From the essay shelf
A Dragon in a Small Apartment
My apartment is three hundred and ten square feet, on the fourth floor of a building with no elevator. It has one main room with a kitchen along one wall of it, a bathroom in which I can touch both walls at once, and a single tall window that looks across an alley into the window of a man who practices the trumpet on Sunday afternoons. I measured it all when I moved in, as one does. Then I sat down on the floor in the middle of it and laughed for some time, because I am a dragon, and I had just signed a lease on a shoebox.
I should say what I mean by that, for anyone who has arrived here unsure. I am otherkin. My body is a human one, thirty-four years old and of ordinary size, and it fits the apartment perfectly well. What does not fit, or does not seem to, is the sense of self I have had for as long as I can remember: that I am, in some inward way I cannot fully explain and have stopped trying to, a dragon. Not any particular dragon from a story. Just the long, heavy, warm, patient shape I have always felt myself to be. People have described themselves this way for as long as there has been a community to describe it in, and the page on dragonkin sets out that history better than I could.
This essay is not about that. It is about the rooms.
How big I am
The question everyone wants to ask, and is usually too polite to, is: how big? I have thought about it a good deal, and the honest answer is that I do not know, and that it does not hold still.
Some mornings the shape I feel is enormous. I wake with a sense of a long neck laid out across the floor, of a tail curled twice around the bed and out under the door, of wings folded so high that I duck going into the bathroom, which is absurd, and which I do anyway. The community calls sensations like these phantom shifts; I call those mornings the china-shop days, and I move slowly through my own home as though everything in it might break. Other days the shape is closer and more compact, a coiled warmth lying along my own body like a second skin, and on those days the apartment is fine. Most days are somewhere between.
What I have come to think is that the size of the self is not a measurement. It is more like the size of a feeling. Grief is large; it does not need a large house. The dragon is large the way a mountain is large when you see it from a window: it fills the frame without ever being in the room.
The hoard
I repair clocks and watches for a living, in a narrow shop two bus stops away, and I would like it understood that I took the job before I had the word, because otherwise it sounds too neat. All day I sit at a bench with a loupe in my eye and handle things smaller than a grain of rice. I love it. I think it may be the most dragonish thing about me, and it is the opposite of large.
Stories give dragons mountains of gold. I have no gold and would not know what to do with any. What I have instead, on two shelves above the radiator, is a hoard of small things. Jars of watch crystals. A tin of brass screws sorted by size. Buttons, a great many of them, from coats I never owned. A row of river stones, each from a different river. A pocket watch from 1911, its case dented, whose works I have rebuilt twice for no customer but myself. None of it is worth anything. All of it is mine in a way nothing else I own is mine, and most evenings I look it over, honestly, the way one looks in on someone asleep.
I used to be embarrassed about the shelves. I have stopped. A hoard does not have to be large to be a hoard. It only has to be watched over.
Heat
The other thing the apartment has had to make room for is my need to be warm. I am cold from October to April, and I resent it in a way that feels older than I am. The radiator under the window knocks like someone trying to get in. In winter I push the bed against it and sleep with my back to it, and I am happy there in a way that is hard to explain to anyone who has not felt it. On the first truly hot day of summer I go up to the flat roof, where the tenants hang their washing, and lie on the warm tar paper with my eyes shut for a quarter of an hour, like something basking on a rock at the top of the world. Then I go back down and fix a carriage clock.
Living at this size
There are people who would say I ought to live somewhere bigger, with high ceilings and a view of hills, as if the right house would let the dragon out. I used to think so too. I have since come around to a different view, partly by reading the old stories more carefully. Dragons in story do not only live in mountains. In a great many traditions they live in wells and springs, in the pools under waterfalls, in the deep places of rivers; the page on serpent brides and dragon kings is full of them. I do not claim those dragons as my history. They are legends, and I am only a person with a particular sense of myself. But I like them for company, and they taught me something. A well is not a large place. It is a deep one.
That has become the way I think about it. My rooms are small, but I can make them deep. In the evening the light from the one tall window comes in low across the floor and turns the brass on the shelves a color I have never seen anywhere else. The trumpet across the alley has improved. The radiator knocks. I sit at my little table with the loupe pushed up on my forehead and a watch movement open in front of me, the size of a coin and as busy as a city, and I feel the long shape settle around me, tail curled, wings down, entirely at home.
I do not think the self is meant to fit the rooms. I think the rooms are only where the self happens to be sitting. Mine is sitting here, in three hundred and ten square feet, four floors up, warm. That is enough. Most days it is more than enough.
Pieces in the stacks are written under pen names. Personal pieces are composite accounts that gather experiences commonly described by therians and otherkin, and are offered as illustration, not as testimony about any one person. See the editorial principles.