L’appartement Near the Square

Creative nonfiction by Sabrina Attar, one of three winners selected for Florilegia's October edition

The apartment was more perfect than I ever could have imagined: tall, milky white walls, linen sheets, and a large balcony overlooking the backlot of the building. A little Parisian-inspired paradise–all walnut, mid-century furniture.

I closed the front door, the silence settling around me. The space was open, the bed sharing the room with built-in closets and a dark wood desk facing out the window, framed with sheer white curtains. A soft October sun glistened through.

Use anything you need, M had messaged me, The place is pretty stocked.

I had never seen M’s face. Her social media page, where we arranged this sublet, displayed a fresco painting of cherub angels as a profile picture. When I searched M online, I found no trace of an online presence that would provide my imagination a curated idea of her existence.

All I knew of the mysterious woman who owned this apartment was what she left behind in her closet: an elegant journal with a few poems reminiscing on family estrangement and nostalgia, several wool coats, a matchbook from Berlin, and a worn copy of Ways of Seeing.

The bedroom had no door. An accordion divider, pulled down by a thin string, separated it from the kitchen. The kitchen led to another door that opened onto the balcony where there was a tiny table, chairs, and half-burnt tealight candle.

It was perfect.

“My princess tower,” I whispered to the room, an early autumn wind whistling outside. I fell onto the bed, and soon again, stillness.

My disdain for Montréal, for my outsiderness as an anglophone, my boredom at the city’s quiet familiarity was softened by this comfort that I now had a place to myself. A refuge where I could hide away from the snow and the French jokes I did not understand and the cold disillusion of questions that would swell in me, often after a long day spent in class or in the library at the university.

Here, in M’s apartment, I could remove myself from the world.

The bed held me and I drifted to sleep.

*

An hour or two later I woke fully clothed on top of M’s bed. The sun had set outside to a deep twilight. Montréal’s frigid winter on the cusp of arrival, stealthily approaching.

I rummaged through my cardboard boxes, unearthing paperback books and New York lipsticks and sweaters, finding homes for each item around the apartment’s corners and drawers. At the bottom of one empty walnut drawer, a white fleck caught my eye. I pulled out a lone cigarette: Marlboro raspberry fusion. Raising it, I inhaled, a sweet, grassy scent. Although I never smoked, I set it on top of the desk.

Later, I read a few pages for my thesis, baked chocolate chip cookies in the oven, danced around the kitchen to Nina Simone, and sweating and flushed, I swung open the door to the balcony, the sharp rush of cold air and dark night grazing me.

My body pulsing with excitement–for my seclusion away from the world. Outside, I sat at the table and with one of M’s matches from her Berlin matchbook, I lit the tealight and with the tealight’s flame, I leaned forward to light the cigarette. A smooth inhale that burned inside me, a chicory taste on my lips.

On this autumn night, I did not know all I would come to lose after leaving M’s apartment. All that I would lose when I moved back home, back to the hamster wheel of job applications and office days and long commutes through a rumbling, dirty city.

I smoked a little more and put out the cigarette. A shiver ran down my spine as the wind whipped fast and then settled. The night sky was glittery, almost iridescent, with small, silver flecks in the distance.

I wondered if it could already be snowing.

✶

Sabrina Attar (she/her) is a writer based in Brooklyn. She writes atmospheric fiction about characters caught in the quiet, transitional moments of life. Her work often lingers on place, mood, and nostalgia. She holds an MA in English Literature from McGill University.