I've become nocturnal. Awake till 2:30 or so, writing or playing guitar, and then up at 11:00 in the morning. I've moved to the smaller bedroom. There's a lightbulb with a yellow-ish chinese lampshade, a wardrobe and a nightstand made out of cheap plywood, and a cot. The walls are the same sea-green as the other bedroom, although here there's been some careless work- a few spatters of plaster. I might be watching too many movies, but there's something cinematic about the room at night, as if it captured the essence of a particular kind of poverty.

There's a window with opaque glass patterned with rectangles and ovals, and there are two panes on the upper part, tinted red and blue. There are two wooden shutters that open inwards, an ingenious design for windows that receive too much afternoon sun at siesta time, but out of place in this tiny interior room. There are no electrical outlets in the room, and therefore no heat. It smells musty in there, although not entirely disagreeable. Sometimes, it recalls the vaguely sweet scent of an old book. The disagreeable part is the dampness, lending the bedroom all the ambience of an unfinished basement, the impression reinforced by the absence of any direct sunlight. At night, I close the shutters, and the room becomes pitch black. In the morning, I open my eyes, and a dim, diffuse light outlines the shutters and the crack in the door, which, warped by the humidity, doesn't close all the way. I reach for my cell phone, calculating what time it might be before I look. There's no way of knowing whether I've woken up on my recent schedule (around 11:00, as I mentioned), or whether something else has caused me to wake up early.

I spend most of the day in the living room, ironically called "el salón" in Spanish. Now that I think about it, "living" room may not be a great term either. Slightly ironic as well, I suppose. Or maybe I'm being harsh. Nevertheless, no room so dark should be painted such a deep shade of purple. The salon does have the virtue of being one of two rooms (the bathroom being the other) to receive any direct sunlight. A genuine ray of light may enter, clouds permitting, at any time during the late morning or the early afternoon.

Meanwhile, the bathroom becomes ideal for showering around 11:00, when, standing in a bathtub with a clogged drain, I can feel some actual sunlight while I look at the pattern of colored circles on the cheap shower curtain. Luckily, the water heater might be the only dependable appliance in the entire apartment.

I'll leave a little jade plant here, which I transferred to a clay flowerpot that sits on the windowsill outside the bathroom window. Each day, I open the window and peer out to the right, where I can see an ornately-tiled patio lined with a few potted plants struggling through this unusually damp winter. I look back down at the jade plant, growing imperceptibly, indifferent.