Looking out the kitchen window, across the street, there is a light on in the chambre de bonne. As I stare at it, in the building dark but distinct against the sky, it seems to me that I am suddenly seeing the light on in that room as others have seen the light on in that room for a hundred years. The light itself no doubt changed from candlelight, to gaslight, to electricity. The change would have been subtle, the movement of the candlelit shadows giving way to the fixity of electric shadow. I feel unmoored from time.

I mirror this feeling of drift in my habits. I avoid my phone. I watch television on the TV instead of my laptop. It’s a real psychological shift, to give myself over to the unpredictability of programming after the specificity of the series (Let’s watch The Wire. I’ve never seen The Sopranos. Is it time to watch Breaking Bad?). It feels like wandering through a crowd, or some kind of county fair, people getting up to things I didn’t know they were doing (and all this time that I’ve been living my life in these apartments, they’ve been out there doing these things. At the very same time!). I click through people gardening, people making jazz music, experts in space travel speculating about what the Americans will do next, a documentary about the TGV, an old film about Vincent Van Gogh that has a very young and very beautiful Elsa Zylberstein in it as a prostitute in some kind of riverbank bordello. I land on a talk show in which women talk about the tribulations of new motherhood. About the way our society has transformed motherhood into a capitalist institution, how it is both competitive and possible to outsource. The guests talk about alienation from their labour and lament the loss of their jobs, their bodies, their identities. I change back to Elsa Zylberstein.

Some days I lie on the bed immobilised for hours, as if a large sheet of cling film were pinning me in place.

Or I stand at the window as the sky does its daily thing.

In the shower, I turn down the hot and turn up the cold, and it feels good and alarming at the same time.