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theessaflett · 5 years

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To All The Ghosts I’ve Loved Before: A Farewell Letter to 53a

Written by Elisabeth Flett

Elisabeth perches on the bed mid-move, March 2019.

How do you say goodbye to something that can’t say goodbye back?

That was the question I found myself asking as stood in the middle of my boxed-up flat, my beloved home for the last four years.

To understand the magnitude of this impossible farewell we need to go back to June 2015, when a unhappy, stressed-out 19 year old first stepped inside 53a. Like so many other second year university students these days I was emerging battered and shaken from a disastrous flat-share, my fresher’s week hopes and dreams of a rosy uni experience from the year before long since gone. I was out of my depth, winging it and wearing my best jacket and quite a lot of make-up in the hope that the estate agent wouldn’t realise that I was still a teenager. Nightmarish images of the truly uninhabitable hovels I’d viewed the previous year with my soon-to-be new flatmates had played in my mind on the bus journey there, as had all the warnings from concerned friends that moving into a flat on my own would be a terrible idea. What would happen if I was burgled? What about if I became horribly ill and needed someone to look after me? As I stood there in the empty flat, the estate agent hovering impatiently next to me, I could see that at least the worry of this place being a hovel wasn’t going to be an issue. Okay sure, there were some cracks and peeling paint here and there, but compared to the underground basement off Brick Lane I remembered viewing in 2014 (no windows, mouldy sofa and nuclear bomb-site worthy toilet…the most worrying part was that I genuinely considered it as a possibility because we were so desperate) it was practically a paradise. The shower was in the main room. The toilet was in a tiny cupboard so small that you couldn’t really shut the door if you sat down on the loo.

It wasn’t much. But it would be mine, and mine alone.

“I’d like to put a deposit on the flat,” I said, trying to feel like an adult but only succeeding in feeling like a child pretending to be a grown-up. A truly terrifying amount of money passed hands, and that was it. I was moving into my first ever studio flat. Sure, it was on the same street as two strip clubs and next to a kebab shop, a nightclub and a taxi delivery service, but what could go wrong? Single living, here I came.

It seemed like a great idea until the first night on my own. Lying there terrified, I listened to every creak, every grumble from the traffic, and was convinced that a hundred axe-wielding murderers lay in wait outside my front door. What was that noise from the landing outside? Should I call the police? My parents, wearily supportive, took my hysterical whispered 1am phone call with good grace but suggested that since this was going to be my living situation for the foreseeable future I should find some way to cope with these entirely irrational fears of horror movie break-ins. Thankfully, it didn’t end up being a big problem; one night of not being hacked to pieces was all it took for me to settle down to the idea that I probably wasn’t going to be horribly murdered in my sleep. It was just as well, as not long afterwards I had my first real nighttime “Situation”…

Picture the scene. You’re nineteen. You’ve recently moved into a flat, on your own, into a part of London you don’t know. For all the above reasons, you’re a bit on edge anyway. And then, at 2am, you’re woken by an almighty crash. I’m talking loud. You lie there, wide awake, hoping that it was part of your dream. And then you hear it. The ominous hhhhssssssssssssssssssssssssssss.

Worried now, you get up, turn a light on, blearily searching for the hissing noise whilst still mostly asleep. You grew up in a house with a gas cooker so in your sleep-ridden state you first check the electric hobs for any suspicious smells, then when that unsurprisingly doesn’t give you any clues you check the boiler in the hallway. It’s not that either. At a loss, you then step into the tiny toilet cupboard, noticing the floor is wet. Something has broken in the toilet, maybe? You idly notice a can of air freshener on top of the toilet cistern, move it out of the way. And then, very dramatically, the bookshelf on the wall - the one your father built himself but didn’t screw in quite enough, the one that had fallen directly down onto the air freshener can and by some mad, wild law of physics was balancing on its nozzle head, causing the air freshener to spray all over the bathroom, the one that now with no air freshener can beneath it continued its downwards trajectory - came crashing down onto my head, with all its contents along with it. Dazed, I lay in a crumpled heap on the floor, surrounded by broken bits of bookcase and battered paperbacks, and mused that this was definitely not on the list of things people had warned me about.

Some of the challenges I had to cope with were a little more expected, if entirely unwelcome.

I have, embarrassingly enough for someone who grew up in the countryside, a very real phobia of rodents, and discovering that I had a few mice for visitors in the winter of 2015 was enough to send me in a state of terror that I found very embarrassing but could do nothing to ease. My Top Two Least Dignified Mice Moments over the years were probably when A) a mouse ran across my floor and I screamed hysterically into the phone to a friend who had to then talk me down from the chair I’d jumped on when spotting the offending rodent, and was still stuck on despite the mouse having run off half an hour previously. B) was a little more traumatising; finding a dead mouse next to my kitchen bin and finding out that I couldn’t “pick it up and put it in the bin” as my Grandma impatiently suggested when I phoned her…because my knees actually gave out when I tried to pick it up and I just fell over whilst hyperventilating. Another London friend of mine very kindly rushed over and came to my aid. I was so grateful I even forgave her when she waved it towards me going,” Look, it’s all stiff!”

Various challenges came up over the years: the time that water came through the light fittings and dripped from doorways because a water tank on the roof had burst; the time that water came through the kitchen ceiling; the time that the toilet upstairs leaked into my Toilet Cupboard…three times in four weeks, but who’s counting; the time that my shower, fridge, washing machine and tap all broke in the space of a month; the time that the creepy guy next door tried to persuade me to take him in as a roommate despite there only being one bed in my flat; the time that the floor started to move; the very scary time a group of drugged up guys were hanging out outside the front door and wouldn’t let me in; the time I was stuck in bed with flu for three days and, as warned by those friends when I first moved in, I indeed had to crawl to the sink myself rather croak out a request for water to someone else. The front door was regularly graffitied. The electricity meter could only be topped up by a easily losable key card. The stairs creaked, and got steadily more creaky over the years, the front door lock broke more times than I can count and the street fights stopped being exotic entertainment and starting just being annoying within the first few months. I hadn’t quite anticipated the sheer level of noise the combination of shops and venues on my street would bring, and the long summer nights full of boomboxes blaring at 3am, screamed arguments about who sold who the wrong type of crack and people vomiting onto the pavement outside the apartment were not my favourite times at 53a. By 2016 I was in a relationship and my girlfriend at the time was not at all as keen as I was about seeing the whole thing as an exciting observation on modern society. “I think someone’s being stabbed,” she would darkly mutter to me as we lay in bed trying to sleep despite the traffic noise blaring outside. “There’s not enough screaming,” I would mutter back with a yawn. “That’s just your average fight. Go back to sleep.” “I would if there wasn’t about fifty cars beeping outside your window. Oh, and now there’s a street cleaning lorry too. I can’t wait for you to move.”

In the end it was our relationship that moved on before I moved out of the flat, but having a second opinion on 53a did cast a few small doubts in my mind about the place. Was the traffic a little too unreasonable? Were the nighttime brawls a little too regular? Despite these musings I continued to love my little hide-away, my safe haven from the world.

How to describe 53a? 53a was:

chipped green paint

neon light

creak of floorboards

lamplight casting soft shadows at 1am

Radio 2 Jazz programmes and the smell of incense

overground train rumble

afternoon sunlight streaming through dusty windows

mug balanced on bed, laptop open

candle flickering, polaroids on kitchen tiles

evenings full of laughter, mornings full of sleep

first hellos

last goodbyes.

This flat was always so much more to me than just a place to live. It was where I rebuilt myself, where I found the bits and pieces of my soul that had got lost, trampled and hidden along the way during the previous years and painfully, painfully, dragged them back to me until I was whole once more. It was the backdrop for my first love, and my first heartbreak. It saw dinner parties, welcome parties, leaving parties, parties where no-one showed up and parties where everyone showed up and brought a bottle of rum with them for good measure. It was where I practised for my final exams, where I decided what to wear for my first day at work, where I celebrated one year out of university, then two. This place has heard many words, some hard, some soft, and many ghosts live inside these walls.

It was the ghosts, in the end, who helped me decide to leave.

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It’s a difficult thing, leaving. Not for everyone, of course - there are some people out there who find change exciting, crucial to how they live their life. I am not one of them. Or rather; I feel like people who say that they like change just don’t notice enough about the world around them.

It’s almost impossible to “like change” if you begin to take note of every single little thing that is rudely adjusted around you, without the slightest warning or heads-up.

What do you think of when you think of an example of “change”? Chances are it’s something big.

Moving to a different job, maybe. Getting married. Or something a little smaller, like getting a new haircut. This is what I’ll call the “top tier” of change, and it’s the only tier that a lot of people notice as they go about their lives. There are, however, other levels below that “top tier”. Things that, if you’re me, clump together to make life just a little more hard to cope with, just a little bit more stressful.

For instance:

If the old bus stop pole that I’m used to seeing every morning has been replaced by a new, less dented bus stop pole, the seat I usually take has someone else sitting in it, the train comes at 8:57 rather than 8:55, the chair I like in the cafe I always go to has been moved to another table, there’s a different person from normal on the check-out and they’ve changed an ingredient in the drink I always get, I find out that the podcast I listen to on Tuesdays has started releasing new episodes on Wednesdays instead and then I get an email informing me that an upcoming rehearsal I was expecting to happen in one venue has been moved to a different venue that I’ve never been to before… That, for me, is a very stressful morning. Now, take that level of what I’m going to call Change Stress and apply it to something as enormous as moving house, especially from somewhere that has as much meaning for me as 53a. It took the front door breaking again, the thought of yet another summer listening to dubstep outside my window at 3am and a really stellar flat showing to convince me that it was time, but here I was. Moving for the first time in four years. And boy, it was hard work.

My moving house priorities would have seemed very odd to people helping me organise and pack my belongings. (…If they hadn’t been my aforementioned long-suffering parents, that is.) When there’s such a big uncontrollable change looming over someone as change-phobic as I am, I tend to bury into tiny details and get very annoyingly intense about them being just right. “No, the tea lights go in the left hand corner of this box! We need to unpack everything again now. No no we can’t pack the radio there, it’s the third item that I’m going to put on my desk, next to the pen pot and opposite that picture frame!!!” A total slide into insanity and Change Stress are hard to differentiate.

“I was walking around my East Village neighbourhood…you know…you live so much life in these very small blocks, and these routes that you take every day…You grow so much, you know, when you think about who you’ve been in this tiny amount of space… you’re living with the ghosts of yourself.”

The singer St Vincent might have been talking about her time in NYC East Village when she spoke these words in an GQ interview about her song New York, but they resonated with me as I watched the YouTube video in early 2019 sitting on my bed in London. It occurred to me that I was also surrounded by ghosts; both ghosts of myself and ghosts of people I had met, been friends with, fallen out of friendship with or had simply drifted away as folk tend to do at the end of university. The streets surrounding my flat were filled with memories, both good and bad, and 53a itself was groaning with the weight of so much life lived under one roof. 2015 was a long time ago, I realised. Everyone else in the polaroids on my wall from parties now long over seemed to have moved on. I should move on too. To have new experiences, to make new memories, and, in time, to make new ghosts.

Now, as the spring sunlight of March streamed through the windows of 53a, I looked around at the boxes and crates and felt a sense of profound loss mixed in with the fatigue and stress of moving and the excitement of what was to come. There was one more thing that I needed to do.

I laid a hand on the wall, breathed in the smell of wood, paint and dust. “Thank you,” I whispered.

It may have just be my imagination but I’m sure, just for a second, that I felt a slight energy through my fingertips, an acknowledgement of my farewell.

Maybe 53a could say goodbye, after all.

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