Peripheries

When I lived alone in upstate NY, it was summertime and for a while I was keeping odd hours, not working, barely ever talking to anyone else, letting all the days blur into one another. I lived in an older apartment above a health food store, next to a bar. To enter my place I would go through a door that said "Celeste" and walk upstairs. Sometimes when I was in my apartment, I felt if there was a playful presence around me. I used to lie in bed and watch the wind lifting the ceiling panels. At first it shocked me, because this had never happened before in any of my other apartments. But then, I was almost in a state of delight, as if I really believed a trickster type of person was playing a game by crawling on the roof, lifting up the ceiling panels, even though it was just the wind.

At some point, I'd get an image of a kid who was just a human being, sitting on some steps staring at a pair of worn out sneakers, not quite knowing what he was doing. But I really felt like this presence was around me for a while. At night, it even sounded like he was blowing on a flute or some kind of pipes outside the window (another game.) When I spoke to some neighbors about the sounds, they said it just the smoke detector in the hallway because it had run out of batteries. I experienced a blurring of what was reality and what was "my imagination," but the "imagination" seemed close to being a part of the reality.

When my mother visited in the winter, she told me she thought maybe I lived in "a spot," that is to say, she thought the region in general could be a place where it is easier for some people to tap into alternate realities or paranormal types of things (if they believe in those things.) I remember us laughing, pushing a mattress up the stairs at the back of the building when I moved into that apartment. Maybe there was lettering on another old building back there because it also seemed like there had been a store which had closed up but had once sold toys or things for parties.