Recollections of My Nonexistence A Memoir - Rebecca Solnit Page 0,12

to walk its streets again before I recollected that I had not lived there in many years, and recited the next address after that and finally the current one that will never be tattooed on my psyche the way that place was. When I lived there, I often dreamed of the street that ran past my childhood home, turned into a country road, and then ended in a horse pasture, the road from which I slipped through barbed-wire fences to so many of my adventures, but now I dream of that little apartment on Lyon Street as a foundational place the way I dreamed of the road then.

When it was still my home, I dreamed many times about finding another room in it, another door. In some way it was me and I was it, and so these discoveries were, of course, other parts of myself. I dreamed over and over of my childhood home as a place I was trapped in, but this place wasn’t penning me in but opening up possibilities to me. In dreams it was bigger, it had more rooms, it had fireplaces, hidden chambers, beauties that didn’t exist in waking life, and once the back door opened onto radiant fields instead of the drab clutter that was really there.

The kitchen walls had once been covered in vinyl brick-patterned wallpaper whose seams showed through the white paint on the back wall behind the stove, so one day I pulled it off. It was like tearing bandages off a wound. It came off in great sheets, pulling the surface of the next layer of wallpaper off as it came. Underneath was the inner layer of an older, more beautiful wallpaper, patterned with lattices of ivy. When I saw the pale brown pattern, I felt the vivid presence of the people who had lived there before me, more ghosts, other times, from before the war, when the neighborhood was another kind of place with other kinds of people on another kind of earth.

Then I dreamed about doing the same thing, and in the dream version I revealed a dense collage of newspaper and magazine pages and scraps of fabric, a lot of floral images, all in rosy hues, luscious and strange, a garden of scraps. In the dream I knew it was a souvenir of another woman who’d been there before me, an old black woman with a gift for making.

The building was located near the center of the city, and thinking of it now I see it as the axis on which a compass needle swings, a place that opened to the four directions. I didn’t make a home there; it made me, as I watched and sometimes joined communities, wandered thousands of miles on foot in the city over the years, sometimes over familiar routes to the movie theaters or to bookstores or groceries or work, sometimes for discovery as I climbed the hills, and sometimes for respite from the density and turmoil when I went to Ocean Beach to be reminded that this was the place where a lot of stories reached their end and, across the vast Pacific, others began.

The churning ocean and the long sandy beach were another kind of home and another kind of refuge, in the vastness that put my woes and angst in proportion to the sky, the sea, the far horizon, the wild birds flying by. The apartment was my refuge, my incubator, my shell, my anchor, my starting blocks, and a gift from a stranger.

Life During Wartime

1

A friend gave me a desk not long after I moved into the apartment, a woman’s small writing desk or vanity, the one I am writing on now. It’s a dainty Victorian piece of furniture, with four narrow drawers, two on each side and a broader central drawer above the bay in which the sitter’s legs go, and various kinds of ornamentation—doweled legs, each with a knob like a knee, knobby ornaments, scallops on the bottom of the drawers, drawer pulls like tassels or teardrops.

There are two pairs of legs on the front, two on the back, set beneath the side drawers. Despite all the frills, the old desk is fundamentally sturdy, an eight-legged beast of burden whose back has carried many things over the decades, or two beasts of burden side by side, yoked together by the desktop. The desk