A professional studio is a beautiful thing and mine was no exception. There were custom shelves and painted pegboards, handmade hooks and clamps, razor-edged palette knives and French enamel trays looped on vegetable-dyed leather. Everything—my awls, my nail gun, my saws, my torches—had been sorted, labeled, and etched with my initials. Handmade boxes (thick cardboard and white masking tape seams) held my history, the archive of my thirty-four years on earth, a lifetime of papers and photographs and additional miscellany from each and every painting I’d ever made. Against the wall in the back were my supplies of propane, ether, turpentine, resin, liquid acrylic, vinegar, ammonia, and so forth—all those wonderful industrial blue and red and orange canisters adjacent to hanging rolls of canvas, paper, linen, stacks of hardwood and plywood, and bags of powdered fiberglass.

I woke up to a bad smell. It was a bouquet of burning rubber, but I didn’t think anything of it because 11 Dutch Street had nine floors with nine artists and we were constantly doing things like running currents through wires to make an improvised hot knife, or melting resin in a recycled can on a Sterno burner, or etching copper with nitric acid, or whatever else dumb toxic thing we felt the urge to do. We did wear masks much of the time, but let’s face it, fumes travel. On the top floor, I smelled all of it.

The morning of the bad smell, I got dressed as best I could, throwing a scarf over my rat’s nest of curls and a black romper over a tattered red bikini (weeks beyond laundry day). I shoved my socked feet into a pair of wooden clogs and grabbed my canvas backpack, which contained my wallet, my paint-coated cellphone, a small Canon camera covered in oily fingerprints, and my notebook. (These details are important because they became my only possessions a few short hours later.) After locking up, I thumped hard on my prime suspect’s door: Ruby, the sculptor who lived one floor below me, was a habitual Styrofoam melter and decade-long abuser of my airspace.

I banged four times and yelled, “RUBY, YOU’RE KILLING US BOTH,” for what felt like the thousandth time in my life. Without waiting for her to reply—it’s not like today was the day she was going to change—I skipped down the rest of the stairs and made my way north, to Pearl, where Jonah had a new delivery of R&F oil sticks. I snapped photographs of colors and textures that caught my eye as I walked: the dun-gray feathers of a dead pigeon, wedged into the waffle grid of a manhole cover. The no-longer-red sneakers on a pair of feet sticking out from beneath a pile of plastic bags and twine on Duane. The hangers left behind in an empty Baby Gap.