Borrowed Rooms

Almost every piece in this issue was written by someone living in a room that belongs, in some legal sense, to somebody else. We did not plan it that way. When the first pieces arrived for a winter issue about home, very few of them described a house the writer owned. They described sublets, rooms above shops, a landlady's radio heard through a floor, nine addresses in four years.

Borrowed Rooms is about tenancy in the widest sense. A rented flat is the obvious case, but a language can be borrowed too, and so can a family's furniture or a name on a lease. The writers here care less about owning than about staying: how long a person has to remain somewhere before it starts to remember them, and what they leave behind when the keys go back.

There are six pieces of writing and one film. Joaquim Brandeiro's story begins with a radio that nobody is allowed to turn off. Sami Okafor-Reyes counts the places he has lived and finds that the count does not add up to a home. Noor Castellane photographs balconies in three cities, and Ettore Castagnola argues against the show flat, that strange apartment designed so that nobody could ever have lived in it. Mira Halloran's poem is short enough to read on a staircase. My own essay is about the last day in an apartment, the one after the boxes have gone.

Mireille Tessandier's Salt Ledger closes the issue. It has nothing to do with rooms and a great deal to do with keeping count.

Wherever you are reading this, I hope the room is kind to you.