Recently I went back to Rue de Chocolatière to retrieve some of my stuff. Since I moved to Geneva, I sublet my room to Aya, a girl who studies at UNIL, and I haven’t been in my room since February.
So it was such a shock to open the door to this room where I spent two years of my life, and find it in a complete state of neglect. It was so dirty, clothes, milk cartons (milk carton!), chocolate bar wrappers, balls of hair on the floor. I did not know a girl can live like that. What’s worse is that she is back home in Algeria for two months and won’t be back until late August. Leaving leftover food in a room for two months is something I can never imagine doing.
A guy, named Artur, who I have never met before, opened the door for me. Laetitia gave me his number. I called him as I got off the 702 bus. And it’s at that moment I realize that no one I know lives in this apartment anymore. It’s no longer the same apartment. Laetitia is gone. David is gone. Lisa is gone. You are gone.
The living room feels different. It smells different. Clean, almost clinically clean (guess where is Artur from? ). The ceiling light of the living room doesn’t feel so warm anymore. Perhaps because I haven’t seen it for a while, it feels white, incandescent. Perhaps that light was never warm. It was us, we were warm in that apartment. We, you, Laetitia, David, made it fun and comfortable to come home from campus. You made that place feel like home.
Perhaps by nature I’m just a very sentimental person. I can’t help but think of all those afternoons we spent slacklining at the church uphill, the nights we ate dinner together. Remember that summer when we first moved in and we rode the bike to campus at night and sat by Parc du Pelican until it’s dark. Remember those times when we went to Plage de prévèrenges and played that chicken fighting game, and how David and I lost completely, and we laughed so hard while shaking sand out of our pants. Remember how we encouraged each other to bike to campus, how we rushed to the window to marvel at the pouring rain or the first snowflake or the incessant lightning? How Laetitia baked all those delicious sweets and indulged everyone. How David was, predictably, stirring his tortellini with marinara sauce. And the music! How we played music, in Laetitia’s room, in my room, in the kitchen. We sang so spontaneously, and whatever tune we were humming would be the music brain worm that infested everyone for weeks on end. Even cleaning the apartment was fun (in retrospect perhaps). We had such a great time. We were so young, energetic, so full of life.
It reminds me, in a visceral way, of the last episode of Friends, where everyone has moved out of Monica’s purple apartment and moved on to the next stages of their lives. Monica and Chandler adopted a baby and bought a house in suburb New York. Rachel moved in with Ross. Phoebe was married. Joey was gone too.
This apartment, Jordils, felt exactly like that for me. Going back to it today was bittersweet. In fact, that’s almost the definition of bittersweet. Revisiting a place that’s no longer the same, but realizing that all those moments, faces, sounds, are with me. Wow, what a crew we were! I would never say things like “wish we could freeze time”, because we have all moved on to the next thing that we wanted, that we worked so hard for. I always knew it was going to come to an end. I’m just so so grateful for this period of my life, for having met you all. Please time, do not erase those images from my mind. Let them fade slower. Please, time, be gentle to us.