Watch Where You Walk

In Chicago, my apartment used to get so messy that moving through it felt like an obstacle course. I was literally jumping through gaps to get from one place to another. So, I brought the outside inside and started marking “safe routes” the way a city does: with crosswalks, danger cones, and road lights. Anywhere I could actually walk, sit, or sleep became a zebra crossing. The material it was made of depended on where the zebra crossing was placed so in the bathroom, it appeared as a toilet seat cover and bathmat, while on the bed, it was on the bedsheets. I even wore a yellow crosswalk fabric as a hair tie in case of “emergencies,” so I could lay it over piles as a temporary bridge.
To mark danger zones, I made small orange “traffic cones” and placed them near sharp objects and set orange road-divider lights by the shoe stand so I wouldn’t trip at night. Together, they turned my chaos into a homemade traffic system, a way to make the space safer and also laugh at it, as I navigated my own mess in a slapstick performance.