The Micro-Life

Content Warning: suicidal ideation, Prozac, depression, mental illness

I used to think it was important to be able to move in an Uber. And if you have ever gone through whirlwind stints of moving every three-weeks-to-every-three-months for any amount of time, perhaps you too have belonged to the two-and-a-half-suitcases club.

My Cool Friend Fern did not belong to this club. Her swanky apartment in Delhi was decked out with a deluxe four-poster king-sized bed, iron lamps, and a claw-foot coffee table. In her closet hung rows of silky chic blouses and dresses, stuff I’d never dream of wearing in sweaty, dusty Delhi (because I never took Ubers). Beneath the garments lay mountains of designer high heels. New, all of them probably cost at least twice my net worth at the time.

I flew to Delhi on a break-up trip to grieve the end of my life’s first great love story. When I arrived in Delhi, Fern had already started a new rockstar position in New York.  In exchange for letting me stay at her pad for free, I got to help her bubble wrap and ship all her worldly possessions back to her over the ocean. Via stop-motion Indian Internet, we spent three days on FaceTime, sifting through her gilded mirrors and blazers to see what was worth packing up. Though she would leave most of her high heels to her cleaning lady, I vowed to myself that I would never care so much about my stuff that it would be worth hauling from one continent to another.

I wanted everything to be temporary. Your whole life could fall apart in an instant. And if you travelled light, you could start again within hours. That’s what it meant to be free.

Strung out in Bangalore, free as a bird. Photo Credit: Maansi Jain.

Back in Montréal, I landed a last-minute flexible lease in a Mile End apartment with woke white roommates. The kind of people who played musical instruments, hosted spiritual gatherings, and stored their dried goods in labelled Mason jars. I unpacked my three-and-a-half suitcases and took up relentless dusting. And sweeping. And mopping.  As my life’s great mythology goes, this might have been a Prozac side effect. As long as I was on Prozac, I was an impeccable roommate. I’d drop everything to purchase unshelled edamame beans if you needed them for your steamed greens. Every Saturday morning, I’d scrub the hardwood floors until they sang. And I wouldn’t blink if you decided to crash the living room with a drum rehearsal without telling me.

But without Prozac, I was not quite as charming. By the time it all unravelled, I spent one vodka-laced evening packing up my 3.5 suitcases and 9-to-12 plastic grocery bags of shampoo and eroded footwear and tie-dye supplies and tahini butter. My sublet was five blocks west. The move took me two trips on foot and one $6 taxi ride. I gave the driver a 100% tip. Thanks to Prozac, now I ran a Micro-Cleaning Empire. This means an extra tiny cleaning company—it doesn’t mean I cleaned tiny things. In any case, now my net worth added up to an extra half-closet’s worth of Fern’s fancy shoes. I was relatively rich.

At the end of that suicidal summer, I walked my plastic bags and suitcases three blocks east. My new apartment came with a sectional couch, a squishy mattress, and zero roommates. The couch was enormous and optimistically white. I covered it with my tie-dyed scarves and let it spoon me as I took naps and/or tried to soothe myself on the kinds of days where you have to sob from deep behind the bottom of your lungs.

The Couch, interesting aesthetics for a minimalist

It took me three days and three rolls of blue shop towels to wash down all the walls and all the floors. My dad and his partner arrived from Ontario with a carload of stuff they’d spent weeks gathering. A kitchen table. Dishes. Extra bathmats. At their full arms and eager faces, I almost wept. I had two double rooms, three closets, and nothing but a couch and bed, and yet I could not fathom where everything would go.

I sipped red wine from out of an ugly thrift store mug with a groundhog on it as my father fought with a hammer and screws. He was putting up curtains to block the alley behind Home Hardware where hard-up folks tended to pee or take naps.

“Curtains really make a space,” said my dad’s partner. She was right. The lavender floral patterns gave a hopeful frame to an otherwise generic melamine kitchen. I was so depressed, I could barely breathe. And yet, here I was, almost home.

Front window, rue Hutchison

Once I got the Internet, I scrolled through the MTL Trade Hole, an underground Facebook group that aspires to transcend capitalism by bringing back the barter system. I traded a bottle of kombucha for a stained-glass lamp. A jar of strawberry jam, a roll of obscure expensive film, mushroom veggie pâté, and two red peppers for a wicker-wood dresser set.

“Can we make it three red peppers?” messaged the dresser’s owner. Sure thing, pal. Who needs money?

Dirty old men smoking in front of a laundry mat watched me as I hauled the dresser and its drawers down Parc Avenue and turned the corner with two blocks to go before I’d arrive at my second-storey apartment. I thought all three trips spoke to a reasonable level of radical self-reliance.

The suicidal summer morphed into a dark, bleak, wack-your-face autumn. I sought solace scrubbing other people’s bathroom tiles with mixed results. At home, I maintained a ruthless window cleaning and wash-your-floor-on-your-hands-and-knees schedule. Most meals consisted of Ryvita crackers and tahini butter, washed down by manky organic carrots from California. Fueled by this and crack-level espresso, I hauled 5km of ass to visit a social worker who helped me write down goals on fuchsia post-its. Eat lunch. Have a nap. Write a gratitude list. In another windowless office across town, I fell in love with my government-funded therapist—not recommended. But the couch and the apartment held me. Instead of offing myself, I micro-dosed on mushrooms and started to write on my living room walls in smelly markers.

“Listen to the sound of your dealbreakers.”

“Flap away victim wings.”

“Your life is of supreme importance.”

Flap away victim wings - Looks like I accidentally cut grace out of the photo, but for the record, Grace says nothing except that you are splendid.

I had a shoebox full of homemade chakras I had coloured compulsively while I had roommates. (This too might have been a Prozac side effect.) On the wall, I taped a spine out of each colour, the red root chakra standing in for the base of my pelvis, the purple one at the top as a crown. Around the spine, I gave myself wings so I could set myself free. On a piece of cardstock, I scrawled out,

This apartment is

one of the most

beautiful miracles

of my life.

It was pink and purple and two shades of blue. I hung the poster in the front hallway. Over in the living room, over the years, the wall gained more wisdom:

“Some undying is better off living a short life.”

“Some deadbeat likes your ass and this infuses you with the will to live for at least 14 hours.”

“This is your strange and beautiful life. You can do all sorts of interesting shit. But you don’t have to. Your life does not have to be a spectacular TED talk.”

My therapist felt like I would do well to enter a program that entailed discussing my mammoth emotions with other suicidal girls on couches. He thought I had borderline personality disorder, and that my ruthless inner critic was always in conflict with the part of me that longed for liberation. Though my undying love would prevail, we finally stopped seeing each other.

I never made it to the couches. My will to live had increased to a reasonable level. My net worth had risen by another closet’s worth of Fern’s exquisite heels. To supplement the cleaning empire, I now had a so-called grown-up day job, translating and revising outsourced offshore websites.

Though I would continue to purge anything that did not spark joy, I became less allergic to owning possessions. I filled my closets and dressers with hand-me-downs and finds from clothing swaps. I bought more ugly mugs at the thrift store. I ordered my beloved therapist’s session notes which I photocopied—one copy for my art supplies corner in the living room, another one for the storage closet. While there were still big empty spaces, I could no longer move in an Uber. But then my house burned down, so it didn’t really matter.

 “I don’t care about stuff. I am the perfect person to survive a fire.”

In some ways I was. When you’ve gone through life in a state of emergency, and finally there is a real emergency, the inner coherence comes with a massive relief.

The Red Cross gave me a pre-paid Mastercard for food which I spent on coffee and granola. Minus the insomnia and blood sugar crashes, I remember feeling so cheerful, as though the fire had set my victim wings on a decisive flight to freedom.  I posted my manic performance every three minutes on Facebook.

“Hi everybody. I’m going in,” I’d call into my iPhone. I wore an N95 mask before those were hard to find. Singed with the smell of melted plastic, the brisk air inside burned my face.  Dr. XXX’s session notes, loose dresser drawers, and the tie-dye collection were strewn amidst broken walls and insulation. On the balcony on Facebook Live, I read aloud from salvaged journals before sealing them into a Rubbermaid container filled with baking soda.

“You’re amazingly upbeat through all this,” some dude wrote in the comments. I was living out of a Dollarama bag. Life felt so full of possibility.

I cancelled my cleaning empire and took my so-called grownup day job to Mexico. Safe in Paradise, I melted down every day. On the beach. Over nachos. Over websites for Miami’s most exceptional adult day cares.

When Corona hit, it became pretty clear pretty fast that I did not have the nervous system to wait out the crisis.

In locked down Montréal, I walked for years, my routes “inadvertently” passing my burnt out, beautiful miracle apartment. Lingering fumes still burned my face. Every time I went, I retrieved some ashen item. A shoebox full of markers, three cartons of matches, two coconut oil jars of clothespins. A black charred wand of sage. 

I could stay at a swanky AirBnB with a corona promo code for April. A friend’s writer’s haven with a colour-coded bookshelf for May and maybe June. On the way to a more long-term sublet, my landlady called out to me from the balcony where she was staying.  

“Erica,” she said. “COVID is driving us crazy! How are you doing? They’re going to demolish the house next week. Make sure you have all your belongings.”

I panicked. But what about the wall? The lamps! I’d forgotten about the lamps.

I rushed back in search of the lamps and other consolation. The lamps were nowhere to be seen. I rescued a mirror with a pink pelican on its border.  

I wasn’t sure whether to leave the chakra spine on the wall, or to take it with me, since I was running out of chakras. But I didn’t want my silhouette to be spineless. I cried about this at least twice. I left the spine on the wall.

The week they were supposed to demolish the building, I went back every day. But there were delays. And first they had to empty out everyone’s couches.  One morning on my pilgrimage, I came upon a massive dumpster in the back alley.

From the fire escape I could see the dumpster held burnt-out disintegrating couches, shoes, hand blenders, lettuce spinners, dresser drawers. On top of a mildewed mattress sat an empty bag of organic carrots from California, a green t-shirt rag from the Faraway Polyamorous Client, and therapy notes (dyed purple from my exploded pens) in which Psychologist Dr. XXX discusses Erica’s struggle to reconcile her insatiable longing for emancipation with her stringent inner tyrant.  Peeking out from beneath a broken piece of wall, a homemade poster, written in pink and purple and blue smelly markers read:

This apartment is

one of the most

beautiful miracles 

of my life.

Back inside, the wall said,

Up close God is not as exquisite.

F is for Face.

This is possible for me.

My new apartment overlooks a lush leafy maple in the summer, and a view of the mountain in the winter. I call it the Magical Treehouse Palace, or just the Treehouse for short. In the weeks before I moved in, each morning I’d trek 3.9 km from my sublet, lugging a bag of my 37 possessions through the heatwave of June 2020. Otherwise, the move took two UBER rides and a lift from a friend. I painted three walls a shade of pink they call Saint John’s Wort, even though St John’s wort is yellow. The rent barely cracks the cost of one pair of Fern’s beloved heels. When my friends come over, they sit on a combination of pillows and skateboards and a broken CD rack that totally passes as a long meditation bench. We eat at a coffee table I painted turquoise after lugging it five blocks and three metro stops in a valiant attempt at radical self-reliance. During the work week, I set up my second monitor on an orange chair I rescued from the curb and lathered in coconut oil. Every morning I roll up a Japanese futon, revealing my empty clean floors. Then at night, I unroll it again to tuck myself in. I haven’t deconsecrated the walls with smelly markers, but every now and then, I tape quotes next to the pelican mirror that survived the fire.

Life is well organized. Thank God for you.

You have everything you need.

And you are

everything you need.

When everything falls away

What matters stays.