Boxed flesh.
There are no ways to enter a tiny flat: you have to merge with it as soon as you walk through the door frame. Sometimes even force yourself into it. There is friction. It is a sardine’s tin can, in which we become soft vertebrae curving and recurving, having to bend to fit in, flesh macerating in clutter and chipboards.
By merging, you slide into disappearance. There is no emptiness to preserve your wholeness. It closes all over you, swallows you like a coffin in the dread of smallness. There is no other room towards which you can plot your escape, nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. Only one room and no exit, barely enough room to exist. Only walls close enough to whisper in your ears, all your secrets back at you. There is no avoidance. Living in a tiny flat is an art of confrontation. The walls stare at you but you stare right back.
That box, barely breathable, barely liveable, is your prison, but also your fortress. A punishment and a revelation. It's the battleground of your survival, and that’s something. This is your thrownness. You’re tossed into this flat without a say, without a chance to negotiate, so you negotiate with the rhythm and find an intimacy with every corner, every crevice. Each crack in the wall, each scuff on the floor is an opportunity to exploit. You take that little matchbox, that shoebox-sized life, and you make it work, because there's no choice but to make it work.
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Sailing the sea of clutter
So, what do you cut loose I ask. Do you remember who you were before? Before this space.
Space? Forget about it. You’ve got none. Everything you own is in your face, screaming at you. Your belongings become a chaotic symphony of clutter. Books pile up like drunken soldiers; clothes drape over chairs like passed-out bums. You learn to navigate the mess like you sail in a storm. Stay on track, but surrender to the waves surging on a sea of details, some significant, some not. That clutter is a living, breathing organism always in motion. It is your worldhood.
Don’t let your being dissolve into smallness, carve your room. You shove, rearrange, discard. You sculpt the beauty of less. Tiny flats teach you to be light, to shed the excess. You become all you’ve got and it’s enough. This is the essence of your being, stripped down to its rawest form. You don’t need much, just a place to think, a place to numb, a place to mutate from dirt to fresh.
Noisy seeping solitude.
You might find yourself with porous walls that let the noise seep like a family of co*ckroaches. And that noise becomes a companion. Familiar recurrences of chairs scraping floors, the bangs of kids jumping as if they weighed about the same as baby elephants, neighbours climbing stairs carrying chronic exhaustion from their soles. The cacophony becomes your soundtrack, a grim reminder that you’re not alone in this sardine can existence. You hate it, but you need it. Even in isolation, you’re connected to the world outside, tied to the lives that echo through the walls. You become a voyeur of sounds, letting them visit you like the friends you’d never have room for. If you find romance it would have to blend in with your skin, melt in your floor, in your sheets.
The proximity of everything is all the promiscuity you get. A table’s corner in the bum, the kiss of a roasting radiator, loneliness is a beast you wrestle with. It gnaws at you, sighs, postulating at your face that this space is a cage.
But these days, a lion in cage is a lion on stage.
The little theatre; notes on space shapeshifting.
The smaller the space, the more movement it needs. It is a constant choreography of furniture. Flexibility rules the incommodious in a dance of hands pushing pulling dragging turning. It is an art. And while you can’t push the outer walls, the inside is a bowel of rooms appearing and disappearing. A space in transit, transforming in the machinery of living, a space that shapeshifts.
Wheeling into action, manoeuvring from constant manipulations, the flat becomes a rotating performing stage, a mini theatre of existence—a giant book of folded stories that pop up each time you turn the page, swiping the old scene away. There is a sense of infinite possibilities, infinite renewal, infinite chapters to unfold—literally, dramatically expanding the horizon. Is this where the word flat comes from? To renew, you must be willing to crush and close some chapters. It is a surreal moment to witness your furniture distort into disappearance while you move from scene 1 to scene 5, skipping 2, with a short break in 3, stepping from bed to desk to couch to dining table. You roll things around, creating new spaces in old ones.
But soon you realise it’s not the space that changes, it’s you. You become fluid, adaptable.
Spectacular routines.
Day.
Act I.
Scene III.
You establish a swinging cadence, the capacity to move through the cramped quarters without losing your mind. Not a routine, a set performance, with acts and moments of improvisation. All the best stories unfold from being set. Crafted and rehearsed. Not from improvisation. Unless it is framed. Coffee in the morning, the sacred ritual. One chair, one table, one mug. You sit, you sip, you contemplate the peeling paint and the gaps in the wooden floors getting larger, dispersing from oversolicitation. You pull on your vape and watch the smoke curl up, thinking how it's got more room to move than you do. Five minutes of impro, end of the scene; moving on.
It does not have to be boring. Twist it more every time so tomorrow can hold epic promises you are eager to attend, so it becomes a spectacle, an impactful display to amaze, witness, endure. Not a one (wo)man show but a show of one-for-one, one-to-one, self-to-self. Playing every day the absurd performance of existence—just for the beauty of it. Doors closed, no spectators, a rehearsal we polish, sunrise to sunrise, a little closer to being believable. The real question is: do you believe yourself?
As the main character, we get to control the narrative. That’s a heavy part to endorse. But the alternative is worse: ending up like the collapsed pair of jeans months away from their last wash.
What’s your story? What’s the scene?
How to expand in smallness
You can’t push walls but you can push your own barriers to expand inside, sinking into your infinite well. Collapsing all the walls from their centre— you—venturing inside of inside until there are no walls left and that caging feeling vanishes into its own illusion. An inscape; a landscape of immense possibility of openings. You learned to live small, to think small, to dream small. To make do with less. Now expanding in smallness means taking the claustrophobia and moulding it into a cocoon where you can grow. You learn to fill the smallness with yourself, and suddenly, the flat isn’t so small anymore.
Living in a tiny flat is a lesson in survival. It’s a test of your endurance, your sanity, your ability to find poetry in the midst of confinement, find unexplored articulations to make the unfunctional functional. You figure out how to carve out a little space for your soul in that cramped, suffocating world, and discover that even in the smallest, most confined spaces, there’s a little room for hope, for dreams, for life.
It’s not much, but it’s yours. And what is yours, fully, authentically yours, is everything.
