Sara Martin on Communal Living as a Writing Practice

This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here.

The boarding house looks like the kind of place children are sent at the beginning of a story after their parents die in a car accident. It is big and Victorian with many closed doors, peacocks on the wallpaper, kimonos pinned flat against the walls at the base of each stairwell and arching jade plants in squares of dusty sunlight. Naturally there is an eccentric aunt-type of mercurial age running the house, and I am not an orphan but a thirty-seven-year-old woman who needed somewhere to live after exhausting the homes of friends during a protracted midlife crisis last summer.

Ana (the aunt-type) didn’t ask much when I went to look at the room that was available. Instead, she simply said she didn’t rent to couples, “you don’t like it, hey,” and put her hands up. While we were talking, I noticed below Ana’s chair were two marble orbs the size of bowling balls and when I bent down to put my shoes on, I saw what appeared to be a large piece of obsidian rock beneath mine. I needed no more proof that I was supposed to live there and texted her all the money I had to rent the room on the fourth floor.

Through writing, I seek to capture what is fleeting, and in this house, without much of my own stuff or utilities in my name, I am aware of how I’ll be here until I’m not.

I’ve always been fond of obsidian because of the poetic nature of its formation: it cools differently when separated from the rest of the products of lava. That’s why it’s a pretty, black glass. The decision reminds me of the poem “Drive-Thru” by Alicia Mountain: “Because Dave Thomas/was adopted as a baby, /before going on to found Wendy’s/we went to Wendy’s./Because my mom was an orphan too/we went to Wendy’s.” She’s saying we pick things because we have to, and the reasons behind them are ultimately random.

While living at the boarding house, I find myself describing it to people as literary. I think often of Anne Sexton writing, “I’m surprised the ocean is still going on,” except boarding house instead of ocean. At first, I thought it was a literary place because of its randomness or because of its likeness to the beginning of a Lemony Snicket book, but now it has more to do with the fact that being here feels like reading and writing. I am in the middle of Ana’s very particular aesthetic and other peoples’ lives, which is reading.

The way I bear witness to both things reminds me of the empathy I experience through literature, and it is different from the way neighbors or roommates ever made me feel because it is unusual for adult strangers to not be sealed away in separate apartments or living constantly on the cusp of small claims court. Instead, we wash over each other like non-fiction audiobooks, and ascertain the essential shapes of each other’s lives through our shoes left by the door, muffled phone calls and breakfast smells. I’ve noticed a tenderness in myself towards the other residents distinct from neighbors I never saw and roommates I saw constantly. The comforting thrum of life in the boarding house is like the company one derives from bringing a book on the train. It is to not be lonely while alone.

Life here is a daily meditation on impermanence, which is a writing practice. Through writing, I seek to capture what is fleeting, and in this house, without much of my own stuff or utilities in my name, I am aware of how I’ll be here until I’m not. And what is the generation of language but a brief inhabiting of space? There is this dust in the house that cannot be removed no matter how much I vacuum, and it has become a kind of visual mantra to me: Everything I put on the page is just something I have breathed in from those who have come before me. It reminds me of something Bill Bryson wrote in The Body, in his chapter about breathing. He writes, “Every time you breathe you exhale some 25 sextillion molecules of oxygen. So many that with a day’s breathing you will, in all likelihood, inhale at least one molecule from the breaths of every person who has ever lived, and every person who lives from now until the sun burns out will from time to time breathe in a bit of you.”

While this eternal respiration is impossible to fathom, shrinking the idea down to simply the inhabitants of the boarding house works for me. That my writing and I are short term tenants of this world and also eternal. That I arrived here with some great pairs of pants and a dartboard, and I will leave behind molecules: little storms held together by attractive forces.