That I’m going to be homeless seems to become more and more probable. I hadn’t experienced the notion of not having a place to stay for a long time, since university times. Back then it was different though. I had an actual place to stay, the parents’s house of course. Like it or not, that was a sort of back up plan. The days as a Bulgarian contorsionist’s neighbor had been fascinating, but I’m not sure I could endure that sort of situation right now. I’ve become old and soft, I need adventure in certain doses, not all the time.
As petty as the desire can seem, the idea of having a house with a bath tub is out of the question. The idea of having a cat is a luxury – if my former cats knew, what would they think of it? The problem is having a house at all seems a mirage, an impossibility of absurd proportions. I see myself blinking with a plastered smile on the face when I go to see apartments and I know I’m not going to live in them. Every one of them has a terrible flaw of some sort, like being on the upper floor in some building hosting a terribly noisy bar. When they’re flawless the owner is clearly against the idea of renting to unknowns with a shady past – foreigners, that is. One apartment has a barbecue but no space for ambulation, another has a dishwasher but also a dishonest landlady. What one has to do to live in peace, or to live at all, for the matter?
At home, people don’t get it. They’re used to Italian ways to go and get apartments. You always seem to have some kind of way out – way in would be more apt in this case – in Italy. Here you feel afraid even to ask to pay more because you don’t want them to think you’re bribing them.
