Back When Screens Were Windows

nostalia for an old apartment I once had, many moons ago

Sometimes I nostalgically recall the first apartment I ever lived in on my own. I was twenty-four years old, and had recently moved to Montreal from a six year stint in Jerusalem. I was working as a part-time elementary school teacher, and with that salary and my intense frugality, I was able to pay the rent (500 Canadian a month), the bills, (just electricity and a land-line,) food (I ate like a bird), and even my grad school tuition. I could hardly believe it. I had true independence.

I remember getting the keys a week or so before I actually moved in, and being allowed to go in and paint the walls any colours I wanted to choose from the cans of leftover paint that the landlord couple had. The apartment was second floor with a balcony, had a living-room, a bed-room, a small kitchen but big enough for a little table, and a storage room, but I had decided to squeeze a bed into the storage room and make that the bedroom, so that I could have two living rooms with different purposes.

I had plans for what I would do in the two different rooms – and all of it was creative work. In fact, each corner of the two living rooms was dedicated to a different expressive form.

One room, I painted dusty rose and forest green. The other was more of a bright olive green – there was wooden molding to separate it about a third of the way up so I did two different shades. There were wooden window frames and wooden floors. The kitchen, I painted yellow with dark green trim on the cupboards. The bathroom was small but had a pink bathtub.

Before I moved any of belongings in (I had next to nothing anyway – a guitar, some books, some clothes and one glorious, expandable Ikea dining room table I had bought for myself ) and once I had painted the walls – I let myself in a few times and just sat in the still-empty space. There was a black futon couch a friend of a friend had donated me. A kitchen table and some chairs, and a flimsy foam mattress that was to be my bed for the next three years or so. A large cardboard box was my coffee table.

I had never had a space to myself before. Sitting in that emptiness was profound, because it was the emptiness of pure potential. I understood that anything I filled this apartment with would be an expression and extension of myself, and I could make anything of it that I chose.

There was also a profound new insight, sitting there in the quiet of it, of how calming it was, and how the idea of anybody walking into that space was upsetting. It was a peace I did not want interrupted or disturbed. It was mine. At least a rented version of “mine.”

I lived in that apartment longer than I have ever lived anywhere in a row. From twenty-four until thirty years old, six straight years. I shed layers of myself in those years and became the Orit who would then, at thirty, quit her day job and emerge into the world as a full-time singer and songwriter.

In that apartment I found my voice, on every level. I taught myself to play the accordion there. I wrote my first book (a literary memoir called “Shall I Not Sing” which I have never (yet) published.) I wrote my master’s thesis on ethics and language, proving that metaphor was the most ethical form of expression, and justifying the next chapters of my life, in so doing. I wrote lesson plans and marked student papers in that apartment, read countless academic articles and books, wrote poetry (at a dedicated table by the window that was only for poetry writing,) and I wrote about one hundred songs, songs that would go on the next decade’s worth of albums, some still never recorded.

I discovered my own attention in that apartment, that is – my own ability to be creatively attentive. I learned how to turn on that light switch in my brain and for the most part, never turn it off.

I smoked rolled up cigarettes of Drum tobacco in that apartment – gazed out the night windows in my frequent insomniac phases. I found, for lack of a better term, a kind of spiritual identity in that apartment, and I recovered, in that apartment, from the lingering mental chains of what had been an abusive, oppressive relationship, and from the post traumatic anxiety of having lived through political violence. (A recovery, I have learned, was not complete, and probably never will be, since its cause continues to exist and make itself known).

The building belonged to a friend of my boyfriend’s (a boyfriend who was seldom around, which made for a very fond heart (not without anxiety) and a lot of freedom for independent work and thought) – The rest of the tenants were all bar-workers who worked at the same downtown bar. My boyfriend’s sister lived downstairs from me. In fact, the only people in that building who weren’t “from the scene” were an elderly francophone couple who had a tiny, tiny dog, and who were both hard of hearing, which worked out very well for my 2 am accordion meanderings. I slept very little in my twenties.

I felt beautiful in those years, though also deeply connected to my “masculine heritage.” – I thought a lot about my paternal grandfather while I worked in that apartment – He too, a writer. I felt his genes in me. He was also my only smoking relative, that may have been part of it too. I felt part of his thread.

Though I hosted a few parties, which I enjoyed doing, for the most part there seemed to be this understanding that though the other apartments in the building were sort of a party-zone and had an open-door policy, late night hours and joints and drinks passed around, it seemed to be unspoken but understood that “Orit’s apartment” was to be left alone. I was the only one in academia and with a ‘real job’, and everyone knew I was working on things all the time, (there was a lot of video game playing and tv watching going on in the others’ apartments, since they all worked nights - which was great for me to meander down and sit with for a while when I needed to take breaks from my work. On warmer days I would come down the iron stairs from my balcony and share a smoke and chat in backyard chairs.

I knew, of course, that I would not live in this apartment forever. I knew it was a chapter, and I knew it was a sacred one. I was smart enough, aware enough to have pre-nostalgia for it even as I lived in it.

I abandoned that apartment, and almost all of my belongings, when, at thirty I decided to gift myself an attempt at full-time artistry. I had finished my master’s degree, defended my thesis, and said goodbye to a tenured position as a school-teacher. I was moving to Berlin, and I let the apartment go to someone else, another friend of my boyfriend’s, so that it was still “in the scene.”

After that year in Berlin, I came back to Canada and with no place to live, I toured instead, postponed looking for a place by what I thought would be a few months and turned into eleven years.

The next time I found myself alone in an apartment was in the fall of 2020, in Winnipeg, in the middle of global lock-downs, in immense distress, in my then early forties, and it was someone else’s home, a furnished sublet. Beautiful, but none of it mine. The articulations and expressions of a stranger I had never met in person. I was a shipwreck.

In that decade between apartments, I had loved and lost relationships, released ten albums, written hundreds more songs, stories, essays, met thousands and thousands of people, travelled in big cities and small villages, made connections and friendships, gotten grey hairs and a little ‘pouch’ of a belly, and had formed a hard-won path and identity that suited me just fine, but was dependent on perpetual motion and show audiences, and hosts I could stay with for a night or a few.

I lost everything I had built, and was now trying to remember my former apartment self – but nothing was the same as it had been back then. I knew I was the same Orit, but I also wasn’t. It was the sameness that saved me.

And when that 2020 sublet ended, after a year and a couple of vaccines, I found myself ‘flung’ back into uncertainty and semi-nomadism, but now with a full-fledged DIY musical career – a decade of development that I could only call an actualization of the potential I had only dreamed of in that Montreal apartment. As much as that was something to celebrate, be proud of, and marvel at, it is a lot to manage, and has taken me away from the purely creative existence one can be when it’s more in potenzia.

My very bones feel heavier, and it hard to say if it is age, or accumulated grief, fatigue that is “organic” and biological or mental and circumstantial from constnatly being blindsided by cataclysmic global events. I still, luckily find my energy and exuberance and light, the kind that makes me feel purpose-filled and ageless, when I am in performance, around friends and fans.

But what I really long for, at times, when I remember that apartment on Chateauguay street, is the energy I had in solitude. I had a sharp, excited and creative mind at all times, and it was making brilliant connections and insights constantly, and I had the physical energy and dexterity to stay up all night, sitting up, and writing about it.

In a way, it was as if I was on a constant problem-solving mission and intensely determined to solve it. The problem, I suppose, was my own existence and identity.

One of the main reasons I started this substack page was to “force myself” to sit down and write longer reflections the way I used to in that apartment. (And you, dear audience of subscribers, are a beautiful motivation for me to keep doing so, thank you).

But here is what got me thinking about this apartment, and why I sat down to write this:

Last night I watched a movie that my dad had recommended to me a few years back.

84 Charring Cross Road. I will venture to call it my favourite movie of all time, even though I just saw it last night.

That woman’s character - It’s rare to see brilliant, funny, single, middle-aged women living alone, having good friendships and intellectual and creative activity, it’s rare to see that represented in anything, so it’s always kinda nice for me to be able to point at the screen and go “I’m THAT type of woman!”

But that New York apartment of hers (two, she moves into a new one partway through the story) they made me writhe in a kind of jealousy-nostalgic mix.

There was no internet to depict back then. Social media didn’t exist yet. The whole movie is about written correspondence – BY LETTERS IN THE POST – and the books, the glorious wonderful books sent to her in the mail – the love of beautiful language, the reveling in it – and the scenes of her in that apartment are filled with coffee mugs and cigarettes and books and a type writer and windows, and god sometimes I want it so badly.

A few years ago, in fact, during those very lockdowns in that very sublet, I watched a documentary with Fran Leibowitz and she seemed like the coolest woman in the world to me and in the included footage we could see her apartment and her book cases and she said that’s all she wants to do: lie around and read books, and she doesn’t have a computer at home either.

I saw it a few years ago, and it too made me remember Montreal and my pre-interent days.

My mind was more brilliant then because I was feeding it more brilliant food.

I would like to blame getting older and cataclysmic world events for the loss of that kind of brain-energy.

But there is something else. And I have to keep reminding myself of it, because it’s important:

In that Montreal apartment, not only did I not have television – I had no internet. I had no cell phone. They were around, don’t get me wrong, I’m not THAT old, I was just a weirdo who didn’t have them.

I also didn’t yet have an independent music career to manage, (for which one needs the internet and a cell phone). used the computers at work when I needed to look up an article, or send emails to my long-distant family members.

When I wonder why my brain doesn’t do the things it used to do, I also have to remember how much of my work has moved to the interactive realms of social media and how much my “self-presentation,” website updates and booking queries - all vital parts of my career survival, eats up my time.

The clincher is this: Once I’m on there, I’m subjegated to EVERYTHING ELSE that is on there.

And (god help me) the scrolling I end up doing when I’m not sure what to do between tasks, or to “help” me fall asleep, or “help” me wake up. Or when I’m waiting at airports, or on long bus and train rides.

When I didn’t have a screen with constant information (if you want to call it informative) – I had no escape from my own thoughts, and that meant I had to let them drive me crazy, flatten me with their overwhelming chaotic noise, which I do remember being a type of painful endurance, but it yielded glorious results, because from the coming undone it would temporarily cause me, I would always, always gather myself back together in splendid articulation.

There was, quite simply, less noise. The noise was internal to me, not forced into me from an insanely oversaturated outside.

I have a friend who lives near San Francisco. I went and visited him a couple of times and he took me to that famous bookstore, City Lights – Of course, I bought some books and at his place there is a serenity of colourful fabrics, books and an old record player. A simplicity of living and fresh air from big trees outside the window. I woke up with the books I’d bought beside me and lifted one to read, a novel of sorts by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and I almost wept at the immenseness of language, reminded how much beautiful language and thought there is in the world, the depth of which is so removed from the language of the internet. It has been ages, I am ashamed to say, since I had held a book of literature in my hands.

Two years before that a soul very dear to me put an 800 page novel into my hands and said “I know you’re going to love this,” and I was afraid to tell him I didn’t think I could read books anymore. So I gave it a try. I had forgotten the company a book can keep you. That you can put it down and pick it up again, and that same anxiety I get between tasks where I scramble for my phone to scroll can be replaced with giving myself permission to pick up the book I am partway through and take a time-out to read a bit more in it. I cried at the rediscovery then too.

I tried to tell myself I would only look on-line once a week and vowed to read more books, but once I was back in my own work-life, the balance went out the window again.

If it so easy for me to identify that I am THAT kind of woman, be it Fran Leibowitz or the character of Helene Hanff (played brilliantly by Anne Bancroft) – whatever am I going to do to gain access to that kind of glorious bookly existence, the quiet and richness of it, when I am also surviving on the interactiveness of a noisy and chaotic fan base (and their postings, and the suggested ads and reels that come mixed in with that) on social media that is BARELY enough to keep me afloat?

Will a screen-time app be what saves me? Or hypnotherapy sessions that somehow rewire me back to be original state, where I would reach for a pen-and-paper notebook before reaching to my phone and swipe, swipe, swipe, swiping at absolute dribble? (that once in a while has something good or funny which is enough to make me go back to it all the time?)

I don’t know. Nor do I know where such an apartment life awaits me, when I wouldn’t even know what city to put it in, or even what country.

Nor do I know what on earth I would do to support myself as I lived in it, reading and writing and gazing out the window when the thing I do to support myself is mostly being on the road performing.

So for now – let me turn to you – my readers – for you, too, have turned to this medium, different than the little quaint (or nasty) posts of social media.

We are all after something more substantial here.

So let us at least vow to keep writing and reading here, and I will continue to pay attention to the reminders of what I want my life to feel like and look like, and find the balance (and discipline) that allows for it back into my life.

With appreciation,
Orit