Over here, a lot of walls get put up; not a lot get pulled down. In the country, that is. In our apartment, it’s the opposite.

There was a wall here…

Just this morning, this disaster zone was my study. Now it’s a hole, and in a few days it will be the entry to Baby’s very own bedroom. She’s been sleeping in the bomb shelter since we moved her from just beside my ear and now, finally, she’ll have a bona-fide room without foot-thick walls, a reinforced door and metal ‘curtains’.

The flip side is that I’m homeless. My room was my sanctuary (or, more realistically, my Golem’s cave) – the place where I hoarded all my books and pens and inks and unused notebooks, and where the floor was littered with negative rolls and film canisters and contact sheets and those bloody electronic cables that can never be untangled and whose parent-devices have long been consigned to the rubbish bin of obsolescence. More, it was where I wrote and where Sufi (the Old Dog) and I used to curl up on the manky old couch together and work and read.

It feels strangely appropriate that the room has died with her. Since Tuesday, I haven’t been able to go in there without thinking of her. Losing my old friend and losing the room seem intrinsically, necessarily linked – like two facets of the same event. And I’m ok with that, if also a little scared.

Published Author told me last week that he once changed his desk mid-novel and found he could no longer complete it; that the plot, the characters, the broader understanding of it all had just suddenly vanished, never to be found again. I’m not as prone to sentimentality or self-mythologising, but still… that was just his desk…

If Unpublished Novel #2 never gets finished, I’m blaming Baby. After all, what is parenting if not the accumulation of slight simmering resentments? I think that’s fair, right?