When in Florence
what is left after a Bad Time
I’m washing my hair under a weak shower in a high ceiling bathroom with a view over a street in Florence. Lukewarm water drips down the glass of the shower cabin, mirroring the raindrops hitting the bathroom window. While applying shampoo, I watch the Florentines driving their Vespas in the rain, little cars parked on the sides of the street and in the neighbour building, a woman is setting up tables. I try to dry my hair with an old hairdryer that I found in the shabby closet. A strand of curls gets pulled inside the motor and I have to cut it off with nail scissors. Later on, I curl up on the couch like a cat. My hair is damp. It’s slightly chilly in the old flat due to a vent in the kitchen, which is basically a hole in the wall covered only by a plastic filter. I sip black coffee from a tiny white ceramic cup and listen to a podcast about books.
I notice: the chill is not that serious. It’s not like “I want to wrap myself in the blanket and stay inside forever or I die” type of a chill. It is more like: I will wear a trench coat and a warm scarf as I walk down the cobblestone streets to an art gallery, with a foldable umbrella in my handbag. It is more like: we aren’t quite there yet, but make no mistake, spring is coming.
Things don’t need to be perfect, they just need to be real. And so I finally find space in my chest to exhale and it makes me feel alive.
The next day I am rewarded for my dedication to the interiors by running into my favourite Swedish interior designer Beata Heuman on the street with her family. It feels like the universe is winking at me in good natured humour after what had been a Really Bad Time. I saw it coming, quite literally — a vision of a wall with a hole through which I would have to squeeze, with no idea what was on the other side. My drawings became a mush of colourful blobs and irregular lines, making it painfully obvious that I was going through something. Yet here I am, on the other side of the wall, drinking coffee and enjoying colour. I'm still incapable of drawing a straight line — but you work with what’s left, and art follows. It is always frivolousness that saves me, and there is no better place to be reminded of that than Tuscany.