Kept Your Curtains Open
This is the apartment building where I grew up. 811 Mont-Royal St, Montreal. It burned down recently. Second floor of a three-story building in the Plateau. My bedroom was to the left when you entered. It had this wall-size window, that one with the graffiti in the center of the photo below. I always kept the curtains open.
Sunlight visited me in the mornings. It woke me up, but I didn’t mind. I slept on the upper level of a bunk bed, just because I felt safe up there. Alone, in the clouds of my precious universe. From there, I could see every mundane detail of everyday life on Mont-Royal. It too was part of my universe.
Now I stood there, gazing at the void ruin of what was once home to me.
Ruins are a strange thing. They tap into the death drive. Their allure is libidinal. Perverted romanticism.
Look at this thing from the past, outlasting its lifespan for my aesthetic pleasure. Or more condescendingly. Look at this pathetic thing trying to outlive its expiration date.
Ruins are so appealing because they make you yearn for their loss, induce nostalgia for what they were, or what they could’ve been, or should’ve been. You never want to make them whole again. Their incompleteness is their appeal. A lack waiting to be watered. Gateway to infinity. So they remain, as canvases for the imaginary.
Soon the brutal reality hits, as you recognize that ruins strike a chord because you are just as close to collapse, just as raggedy, fragmented, overworked, or haunted by the melancholia of a lost past, and longing for the utopia of an impossible future. Seeing my home burned made that obvious.
The existential realization came with other, ghostly ills.
My dad was forcibly displaced from Santiago, Chile in 1975. His dad had been targeted by Augusto Pinochet’s secret police, DIN (Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional) for his associations with the Communist Party. He fled to Canada to avoid torture or death, and the rest of the family came along a few months later. They settled in a small apartment on Mont-Royal Street, just about two blocks from where I grew up.
He was twelve.
This is him before.
He doesn’t know when.
He found home there eventually. But assimilating to Quebecois culture seemed to come at the expense of his ties to Chile. He kept eating Chilean food, listening to Chilean music, and learning about Chilean politics. But when it came to me and my brother, Chile was ruin, trauma, and nothing more. He never taught us Spanish. Melancholia tarnished any solace he could have found in sharing what once was home to him. He never talked about it. Distance was his protection. I could never blame him for that.
An annoying thing about my dad is he likes to keep his curtains closed. I recently gave him a few house plants to force him to let some natural light in. It’s worked and he’s surprisingly good with them. I’ve also built new ties to Chile during the past few years. I absorbed everything I could about Chilean art, literature, music, cuisine, and learned some Spanish. I even devoted my master’s thesis to Chilean queer art-activism under Pinochet. I’ve grown much closer to my dad through that. He found joy in my curiosity—in knowing that he’s my window into Chile, despite the distance.
It’s always there, behind the curtains.
I don’t think of home in spatial terms anymore. Home is more a trajectory, a disposition. Home is the unknowable field inspiriting your mind and body. Home is devotion. Home lives in liminality, in-betweenness. Home outlives a dictatorship or a house burned.
I came to find some poetry in the ruin of my childhood house. Kinship flowered from the flames. Proximity to my dad’s own feelings about home. Poetry in the echo. Intimacy in our silent melancholia. Grace in solidarity.
Blessed be the ruins nurturing our souls.