Floorplan

There are so many apartments that they all blend together in my memory, a living room here, a hallway there…

I used to draw blueprints of dream houses when I was a kid. They were all apartment buildings—that’s all I knew growing up—but each one was meant for a single resident. I drew cross-sections showing each fun-filled stratum of my digs. Each floor had its own theme: skateboard park, pool with waterslides, library, trampoline room, movie theater. Every room had a soda fountain, which I thought, when I first heard the term, was just a regular water fountain that spouted 7-Up and Cherry Coke. My real childhood homes are just as imaginary now as those carbonated palaces, a collage of spaces from Buena Park, Van Nuys, Northridge, West L.A., Panorama City, Torrance, only my mother and brother are there. There were no separate spaces then, no such thing as privacy. Our lives didn’t just overlap, they were dog-piled and smashed into one another. Every memory singled out from my childhood is invaded at some point by one of the two. I’ve learned to live with them now; they reside in me like squatters who’ve taken root after several generations. I think that’s why I’ve always been attracted to big cities—I can preoccupy myself with lots of new spaces, design new mental blueprints, and push my mother and brother into a dark closet somewhere. But I know they’re there. Sometimes I hear my mother when I speak (those horrifying moments when you realize where a certain phrase came from), and think of my brother whenever I see someone with Down syndrome. They come to me in my tastes for certain foods, in my love for spontaneous travel (my mother is notorious for slapdash budget trips), and in moments of guilt. I know then that they aren’t parts of the blueprint, the one I’ve labeled “my character.” They’re the goddamn architects.