I live in the crack of a dilapidated building.

This crack is no ordinary crack. This crack is as stale and moldy as last week’s bread and just as cheap, which is the only reason I live in the crack of a dilapidated building.

My room is furnished with the bare necessities: a single bed, toilet, shower above the toilet, and a mini-fridge. It also has a fan, which doesn't quite make up for the lack of A/C, but I’m superstitious and fear that as soon as I complain about that creaking bastard, it will self-implode.

The stairs I live beneath are made of wood that was solid 100 years ago. They creak and groan every time the tenant above me comes and goes. While I’ve never seen this tenant, by the way my slanted ceiling flexes under their heavy boot, I can safely infer that he or she weighs double, if not triple, what I do. Usually, I wouldn’t have any prejudice against the man or woman who enjoys an extra serving of dessert. But in the case where my head rests directly under the stairs that were solid 100 years ago, I am forced to consider the ramifications of an extra servings of fresh donuts and strawberry cream.

My room has two windows. One is small and the other is smaller. Both are portals into foreign and interesting worlds.

Window 1:

 (Jarvis, enhance image)

From my crack beneath the stairs, I look out into the free world and see this abomination glaring back. It looks as if it were designed by five architects who didn’t speak the same language and were completely and utterly under the influence of mezcal and marijuana.

Imagine wanting to let in some fresh air and opening this window just to look up and see toddlers skipping along the uneven balconies with half-rotted floorboards surely peppered with rusted nails.

It’s impossible to view without feeling some level of unrest.

At least that was the case for the first couple weeks here. Eventually, as with most novelties, you get used to it. And after you get used to it, you forget about it. Unless of course you are trying to write something worth reading that’s based in the importance of observation. Then you would be forced to look again and again in attempt to discover what you missed or misread.

So what did I miss?

Bricks, sheet metal, plaster, and wood, twisted together to resemble something of a home. It’s a story of creativity and perseverance. People who scrapped together whatever they could to provide shelter for their loved ones in the face of the desolate and harsh reality governed by Russian authoritarians.

While one can’t be bullish on the structural integrity of these types of buildings, they are much preferable to the oppressive, limiting, and horrendously unimaginative postmodern architecture that has consumed the West.

You can look at a Rothko and know it’s a Rothko.

You can read a paragraph of Hemingway and know it’s Hemingway.

You can listen to a phrase from Miles Davis and know it’s Miles Davis.

You can look at this building and know it belongs in Tbilisi, Georgia.

From the crack under the stairs, I look out and see a beaming example of unabashed authenticity. Authenticity born out of necessity.

My second window is even more interesting.

Grape vines, laundry lines, and a family that loves to whine and dine.

That’s not a typo. I do mean whine.

Across the courtyard lives a family of six women: two old, one ancient, one middle-aged, and two young ones. I have never seen a man with them. In fact, in the last month, I have not seen a man enter this courtyard. If my heavy-footed friend upstairs turns out not to be a man, then it would seem that I am the only poor lout in the entire dilapidated building.

This was quite a startling realization.

Not because women scare me, but because I thought I unknowingly moved into a den of witches! That would certainly explain the litter of black cats roaming around. Perhaps even, my landlord was in magical debt of sorts and needed to find an ignorant traveler to offer as tribute.

(Living underground with too much time to think will tempt the mind to explore every possible explanation, no matter how wildly egregious.)

The ancient woman never scares me. She seems more or less completely oblivious to my existence. The other two oracles are a different can of worms.

Firstly, they are more or less identical twins. They talk the same, hobble the same, and wear the same clothes: jet black dresses with even blacker shawls.

I say more or less identical because they each have a unique feature.

One has a mole jutting out from the right side of her chin that even a blind man could see. This is not because it’s large, though it certainly is no speck of an island, but because of the grey hairs that shoot out from it like water out of Bellagio Fountains.

I don’t know if this is a clear enough picture, so allow me to continue.

These hairs are so prominent that when I first shook her hand, my eyes fell from hers and caught sight of one the heads of the Hydra lunging directly towards the top of my thumb! Though I am well-educated enough not to be superstitious, I often can’t help it. I thought if that hair came in contact with my hand, it would mean certain amputation. Perhaps from the elbow down. Or worse, I would wake in the morning with my own Bellagio Fountain mole!

By sheer luck and good fortune, she released her iron grip just in the nick of time for me to retract my hand into the safety of my coat jacket. The hair continued in a beeline, plunging itself directly into a warm and familiar place: the center of her coffee mug.

The twin sister’s distinct feature is her lazy left eye. Remember, her sister’s mole is on the right side of the chin. This means two things:

1. When they are talking amongst themselves, face-to-face and in their usual stools, I have no basis whatsoever to tell them apart.

2. When they are talking directly to me, my skins crawls but my feet freeze.

Surely, you understand my predicament?

Their twin bond diminishes any sense of hierarchy. They often speak at the exact same time, and I haven't the slightest clue whom I should address.

If I look at the one with the hairy mole, I inevitably end up addressing the mole!

If look at the sister with the crooked eye, I can’t decide which eye to address! Because while I described it as lazy, her eye is only as lazy as the Eye of Sauron itself. It's constantly shifting, searching, and seeing beyond what any mortal eye should be allowed to see. Even when I am back in the safety of my crack under the stairs, I often have the eerie feeling of being watched.

If you are suggesting that I close my window to solve the issue of privacy, you have already forgotten my predicament: the crack I inhabit is stale and moldy. Without A/C, I am forced to keep the window open else I risk catching the Black Plague (be it from the mold under the sink or the hairy mole, I do not know).

This would not be uncomfortable if they were only in the courtyard for an hour or two a day. This, as you may have already guessed, is simply not the case.

My neighbors spend more time in the courtyard than in their home.

They use it freely and comfortably, as if it were their living room. I suppose by most measures, it is their living room.

Without exception, they are always either peeling vegetables, snacking, smoking, or arguing. That is it.

They whine and dine every day, and some days the whining is more intense than others. If they remember I am home, which they do because there is always at least one eye on me, they do not give a damn that I hear their family quarrels.

Like the ugly building from beyond my other window, this scene was initially very foreign and rather disturbing to me. Where I come from, fights are held behind closed doors. This was a case of the exact opposite.

The more they fight, the further they get into the middle of the courtyard. They all hop off their stools, point fingers, stomp away, take an angry puff, then duck back around under the grapevines and between the hanging sheets to start it all again!

These furies never last and within a half hour each of them is back on their stool either peeling vegetables, snacking, or smoking.

After one of the first fights, I got a knock on my door and the little girls were standing there with a plate of dinner. I thought this was an apology for the fight, but of course, that never crossed their mind. This was just their way to welcome me into the dilapidated building.

When the girls came back for the plate, I stacked it high with dark chocolate. This is how I began to build report.

(Secretly, my hope is these little acts will protect me from any future hexes or spells.)

Now, hardly a day passes when I don’t exchange some nibbles with the den of witches. They give me green bean egg scrambles, sweet bread, pickled garlic cloves, fruit, borscht, and other bowls of various steaming soups and chunky stews.

My fridge is a decidedly less diverse. I usually send back bowls of berries, dark chocolate slabs, or ice cream bars.

This turns out to be quite a good system: they give me dinner, I give them dessert.

Once, during a three-day fast, they delivered khinkali, a type of Georgian dumpling. A traveling commandment of mine is never to turn down food, so I didn’t; I instead slipped them into my mini fridge with a quick sleight-of-hand movement and smacked my dry fingers to make it look like I ate them all. Remember, I had to do that. The Eye of Sauron is always searching.

The problem was I had nothing to send back. All I had were some oats, two onions, and half a clove of garlic. Seeing no possible combination of these ingredients, I resorted to a timeless trading good that I learned from the trappers in my homeland: tobacco.

I still had a half-pack left from my taxi driver in Armenia. He didn’t want to bet money on our backgammon match, so he wagered his smokes instead.

Admittedly, they looked strange rolling around on the top of a dinner plate, but it was a safer bet than oats and onions.

To my pleasant surprise, this delivery garnered the most respect and thanks of any of my previous. Fifteen minutes later, I heard them start to argue again. This fight I suspect was caused by the unfair rationing of the cigarettes.

Like the view from my smaller window, I have grown to appreciate this courtyard and the characters within.

Traditional houses were always centered around courtyards. Modern architects would say that is due to functionality, but that ignores the true essence of what a courtyard is.

A court is an open garden. A garden is in nature, a God-created world. And what is a building? A man-created world. So the courtyard serves as a spiritual anchor for the man-created world surrounding it.

This is why I love looking out my small window into the courtyard.

It is a daily reminder that the center of life should be the mole.

Wait. That’s not right.

I meant the soul.

Yes, the well-being of the soul should be the center of life. Not the mole, and definitely not the oversold attractions and distractions of the man-made world.

I told you this crack was no ordinary crack.

“A house without a courtyard is like a man without a soul.”

– Abdel-Wahed El-Wakil 

(Egyptian architect famous for his mosques.)