After university, Layla moved to the city. To a one-bedroom apartment just outside the downtown core. It was a four-year-old high-rise but looked much older, made in a restrained art-deco style: grand in the old-fashioned sense, unassuming, with patterned bricks the colors of sand and weathered sand, rows of black-trimmed windowpanes, a gated and chevroned archway for cars to pass, and ornamental stone-columned fences and globe lights paced and perched throughout the façade.
It was very different from the building right next to it, the one Layla was first taken to see: a modern glass high-rise, a soaring glass block of which many birds flew into in beliefs of reflected sky. Layla entered and felt a combination of wonder and coldness at the inhumanely large and echoey lobby with its uncomfortably sleek furniture and palette of pure shades. She gazed at the décor that seemed like modern parody, at the contemporary sculptures and artwork made only with the goal of being contemporary, and at the odd flourishes of crystal and glass where there could have been texture or silence. It all seemed like it was made for the awe of people passing or driving by, built for the idea of people who were modern in the worst sense—those who wanted to prove they were modern and lived in such buildings to remind themselves and everyone else. Layla could not imagine living here and knowing or even wanting to know her neighbors or the building staff. She felt like a burden at the gaudy front desk, like a defendant at a small claims court, like a number, an echo. She left the lobby in frustration for some fresh air and paced outside the bare entrance. It had been a long day with many showings and none had seemed right. She gazed down the street and at the people passing by, and then at the neighboring high-rise, the Art Deco, first in nonchalance, but then another time, and then another time with curiosity, slowly forming in her mind everything she now knew this building was not. She approached the façade and entered the vestibule and looked through the doorway glass and knew like the few times a thing could ever be known. There was no place like home.
Through rain and shine and snow and heat and construction, Layla, for the next eight years, passed through the same vestibule and entered the same lobby which had never lost its charm. It was elegant but not opulent, with layers of texture, from the soft white light to the cream-colored wallpaper with golden streaks, and from the comfortable yet stylish grey basketweave cloth sofa to the never-lit candles and never-read books patterned on birch shelves and the white oak coffee table. It was spacious but still intimate with a refined and versatile aesthetic, inspiring compliments from grandparents and friends alike with words like classy, warm, and inviting. Layla would pass through almost every day and greet the concierge and pick up her packages if she had any. She would greet the cleaning staff if she saw them and take the woodgrain elevator cab up to the seventh floor and sweep through the carpeted hallway to her apartment at the end of the hall.
On this day, Layla was getting ready for dinner. She had just taken a shower and was drying her raven hair in the light of her full-length mirror while studying her reflection. She was pretty, but not overwhelmingly so, lithe, but not bone, neither tall nor short, with clear olive skin and a balance of soft and sharp features. She was quite satisfied with her chameleon-like profile and enjoyed influencing—as much as she could—her chameleon-like range of perception. She would dress up or down with ease and exact a professional or casual or laid-back or sultry tone with the deftness of a puppeteer, choosing the perfect flourish of accessory or makeup or clothing and choosing to remain bare of tattoos or peculiar piercings or hair dye to maximize her versatility. She would practice almost every angle and variation of her smile and could call forth a well of warmth with a performer’s precision. She dreamt as a child of being an actress. She dreamt of bright lights and crowds in eager anticipation but grew to let go of these dreams, for many reasons perhaps, but mostly due to feeling in them a vicious sort of applause, one that demanded gratitude and a suffocating control of her strings. She wanted to be seen but seen in the right way. And what right and wrong were she did not judge for others but did for herself in everything she chose to be, slightly mending her feelings of right and wrong like all do in different seasons and moods and beings. She wanted to be seen but seen in the way she wanted to be seen, envied at first for her grace and generosity and education and accolades and then and only then—like a cherry on top—for her looks. She felt that this way was the only way to be truly loved in the same way by masses of men and women alike, men who patted themselves on the back when they appreciated a woman for more than her looks, and women who could only appreciate a woman from afar.
It had been eight years since Layla had moved to the city, and she was starting to feel a heaviness in her motions, growing like an insidious shadow. In meeting people, and in conversations with friends, she found it harder and harder to draw from the muscles of her face any expressions of warmth. Despite her meaning to be genuine, people around her would sense a dissonance but then shake it off, choosing instead to see Layla as she always was—the steady and pleasant glow of any room. When she first moved to the city, Layla worked as a french teacher, putting her whole being into every lesson and child in the attempt to make a difference. But her resolve was slowly chipped away by an ever-increasing lack of a teacher’s autonomy, the unrealistic expectations of senior staff, and countless unpaid hours after school and on weekends preparing lessons and grading papers. After five years of disillusion and deliberation, she quit her job as a school teacher and switched to a completely different industry: software sales, a still stressful but more lucrative career, one that allowed her peace of mind outside of work and freedom from the weight of a purpose beyond herself.
And it went well. Layla finally had enough time and resources to see the world and experience the finer things. She could be spontaneous and carefree, and the coming years whispered beautiful photos of everything life would turn out to be: all-inclusive vacations and cruises after Christmas, michelin-star restaurants in third-world countries, multi-day music festivals on mushrooms, exploring the city, bumming on the beach, dating apps, flings, and relationships that would mostly end in painful confusion—a paradox. Layla would present herself as everything she wanted to be, but then realize that it was everything he wanted her to be. He would believe her performance and Layla would find in this some joy but end up mostly disappointed, because he could not see the real her, a her that she did not know. She would search for the truth of her disguise through an endless fog of what the world and she wanted from Layla. He would ask why she would at times listen to such sad or strange music, or why she would linger in the light of such grotesque art. She would draw eerie birds in the corners of her pages and drift at times toward the presence of artists, feeling in them no pressure to be anything except a being. She would see herself through their eyes and hope they saw beauty in what she could not bear to see.
She looked around her apartment. At the bare ivory walls in glow of the sunset. At the second-hand furniture: the light brown corduroy couch, the white-diamond-patterned accent chair, the grey shag rug. She looked at the dark brown hardwood floors, the white kitchen cabinets, the green plastic muskoka chairs on the balcony, and the mandala-patterned pink and purple duvet. All as it was, years ago. All those moments brimmed in between like less than a dream, a forgotten fog amongst the cruel stark sameness of her apartment. Trips and dinners and dates and events, long past digested, all of a pleasant but not permanent hue, and all judged by the cruel stark sameness. Could time really be said to have passed at all?
She closed her eyes and remembered her mother’s house after a breakup, a bad one. She remembered her mother sitting on the couch as she sat on the floor, her mother massaging coconut oil into her hair, massaging her temples, grazing her eyelids and slightly pulling upward on the tips of her ears (“it keeps your brain sharp”). She remembered the smells of South Indian spices flowing from the kitchen, coriander, cumin, cardamom, the smells of her childhood.
“Layla molae, I am so proud of you, your confidence... your freedom. I get sometimes jealous. But life… a woman’s life, is compromise.”
She did not get angry, or annoyed, as she usually did, when her mother joked about wanting grandchildren, or joked about her clothes being too revealing. She sensed a rare hesitation in her mother’s voice, a deep shade of regret, the unfiltered light of a legacy so real that it could barely bear to be true.
She looked around her apartment again. At everything as it was. Compromise. Could she still have it all? And if not, what would be enough? She walked toward the balcony and perched herself near the edge, her damp raven hair fluttering in the light evening wind. The soaring glass highrise was in view, and she could see the art deco with a rose glow in its cold blue reflection. She imagined flying, and falling, but never the impact. She felt the steep irony, of how so many must be just as lonely in countless blocks of both buildings, scrolling. She felt how strange it now seemed to live alone, of how excited she was to move in, and how she enjoyed solitude only in knowing that it would surely end. And she was no longer sure. If Layla died today, who would she be tomorrow? Perhaps it would be like sleep, endless dreams and memories burning beyond future or past, always Layla with flowers in her hair gliding through a stone-hilled mediterranean city dressed like the prettiest gypsy in the evening light dancing in the open-aired cabana melting her hips and moving through music with eyes closed and cheeks flushed and local boys with piercing eyes piercing the mist Layla melting through thoughts of being and meaning and why not as she moves with her pretty lithe friends she met at the hotel with the bright lilies and blue roses painted prettier than graffiti on sun-stained cement Layla like the song dancing and being and swearing not to think ever again and ever again and if no man should come and strain her in his arms the real Layla perhaps another would be enough to bloom through the endless night with marrows full of life and no thoughts of time and cool winds of ocean brushing her face Layla waking up from deep sleep and once again feeling more and more like everyones Layla gazing at the city dreamed as a child and she remembered her mother and she so wanted to be a mother and a child in the back row of a minivan with strong hands reaching through her daze carrying her through bright meadows and tall trees a child no more with children in her classroom boys voulez-vous coucher avec moi and gliding through the city in her flats through cold and rain and heat with a starbucks cup in hand walking through the bustling noise past the pizza place with the wednesday special and past the concierge with the piercing eyes Layla like a dream with so many dreams flickering through every motion everything that was and everything that could be rendered unknown a sad song of instagram posts pretty Layla who would have guessed she always seemed so happy and full of life tsk tsk she should have called me I should have called her so pretty with a bright future what a waste Layla waiting for the elevator finally working thank god after a long day of sales on the cordoroy couch scrolling with the silence of silence encroaching and missed calls from her mother and she remembered her mother and exhaled on the balcony and remembered how bittersweet it was to remember and she felt the stage that was life and so it was and so she was always writing Layla and perhaps she must live and keep living to write again and write again and find again Layla a raven ready to leave the city of reflected sky.
Beautiful like a vivid cosy dream.
Thanks for sharing
Beautiful, thanks!