This week I’ve chosen to cover Leila Chatti’s “Aubade in the Old Apartment.” It discusses the apartment and area she had lived in during the beginning of her adulthood that she returned back to later on.
This poem is significantly longer than any of her other works that I’ve read. She describes everything in her setting with such detail, almost as though she wants you as a reader not only to envision this place, but to place yourself there, too, and truly feel the essence of this apartment and the experience of living there. She describes how it brought her so much comfort even though she didn’t realize it then. She even uses the term “you” a lot (not only to refer to her partner, but also) so that readers can see themselves in her words, making it a more personal reading experience (and nearly a conversation).
I personally don’t know if the time in her life that’s being referred to was the happiest, but it sure sounds like it as Chatti explains every little thing so carefully with care and passion. She makes the smallest things sound so charming and cozy. She even begins by mentioning how she “[woke up] inside the old apartment,” but then corrected herself saying, “No- [she woke] in the apartment two doors and one floor down, in the 1920s building slightly past its prime, but still charming, with its rust-
colored trim and wide, wooden staircase,” emphasizing how this isn’t simply the ‘old apartment,’ it was something that grew to be a significant part of her life, and a home.
What jumps out to me the most is how Chatti brings a sweet yet slightly melancholic tone about the idea of how everything is finite. She mentions so casually (and I think this is my favorite part of the poem), “[she has] been so lucky
to wake to like any other...[she knows] it will not always be like this: [her and her partner] so poor and wise or desperate enough to think anything [they] own is beautiful just because it’s [theirs],” illustrating a simpler time in her life where she had such appreciation for all the little things around her, finding the beauty in them even when she didn’t have much herself. And though at this point in her life, she had already gone on, accomplished many great things, gathered wisdom and success of her own, still “..for now,
[she and her partner] are [there], back in the old apartment,” where everything started and circled back to in the end (perhaps creating a reflection of how far she had come in her life thus far). Something else I love is that, even though her experience of going back to this apartment reminded her of little things that were left behind, I could tell a lot of what she described were already things she loved and carried with her in her memories, like “the same subways rattling into the station just down the block, the donut shop and the wig shop and the pizza place no one goes into and the neighbors who remembered [her and her partner],” just as she remembered.
Finally, Chatti brings her descriptions to an end and recalls how looking at all the things that were once so new to her “everything so similar to how it was, [she] could almost forget this life isn’t endless—not a series of these simple and good enough days,” reminding the reader how it important it is to appreciate every little thing in their life, that sometimes the things that are "good enough" are the ones we miss and would rather go back to, almost like it all has meaning and later on contributes to the person you become and flourish into.
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