Name: Scaffolding
ISBN: 9781784742942

Lauren Elkin

Scaffolding

Lily Dendy

The light in August brings the street together. When the sky goes deep blue, earlier than it has been, you can either turn on the light and decide it’s evening or sit a while longer, watching everyone else turn on theirs, creating orange pools in the dusk spill. The light recedes from the street, replaced, slowly by windows like beacons. You can stand at your window and not be surprised to see your neighbor standing at their windows too, pausing to watch the conversion from day to night. And when you have sat long enough with the night, you can go into the hall and turn on the light. The separation has been observed.

In their kitchen, I can see they have an electric blue bowl, and it is often filled with lemons, and the contrast of the yellow against the blue gives me such longings. And it is also because of these longings that I tell myself, I am turning into one of those people on Instagram consumed mainly with thoughts of my own home and how it appears. But it feels deeper than that, and more existential as if I will only survive through my environment in my belongings, my be-longings. I think of a blue bowl I had that was not the same color. It had a Moroccan pattern. I bought it in the shop in the Marais, long since closed and turned, I think, into a Uniqlo. I can’t remember exactly where it was on the rue des Rosiers, but I know it was in a courtyard and it was immense and had kind of a little mezzanine level when you walked in and that’s where I found my blue Moroccan bowl, and I used it to keep oranges in… I could buy a blue blue now but it wouldn’t be the same; I have to wait for one go one back into my life. And here one is, but it isn’t mine. 