Inventory of a Borrowed Apartment

The kettle whistles in someone else's key. On the windowsill, a cactus has outlived three tenants, indifferent as a small green saint.

I open drawers and find the maps of strangers: a button, a receipt for olives, a single hairpin curved like the question I keep refusing to ask.

The radiator clicks its small brass language. Outside, a tram rehearses its one long vowel between the linden trees and the post office.

I sleep in a bed shaped by another body. Each morning the sheets remember someone they were promised to, and I rise gently, trying not to wake their absence.

By evening, the rooms have learned my breathing. The cactus, the kettle, the patient ghost in the wallpaper — we agree, without speaking, to call this home for now.