placing the pieces

Settling into a studio apartment, especially once that's half as big as the last studio you lived in, is like completing a 4,000-piece jigsaw puzzle. It takes a few days to find all the edge pieces, and as you do, nestling books into book shelves and food into cupboards, you start to think about where the inside pieces will fit. But just building the border of the puzzle doesn't do you much good in that regard; one at a time, you have to find a way to slot each remaining piece in. So you ruminate. You push things that seem like they might fit together toward each other, but you let them hover, not locking anything in until you are sure. Delightfully, there is a point at which you suddenly see that the stereo should sit here and not there, and that frees up a hole on the wall for your favorite artwork, and then it's clear that another piece of artwork goes ever here. And then you have walls that look like the walls of a home, and then you have a bedroom that feels less like a booby trap and more like a place to put your feet up, especially now that you've cleared both sides of the sofa of inside pieces; and now you have music, with speakers that are plugged in, and so, you think, tonight perhaps you will finally get that thing that all this unfinished placement has prevented: a lot of sleep.