The abandoned cardboard moving boxes remain in the corner of the little apartment.

The abandoned cardboard moving boxes remain in the corner of the little apartment.

Look around for signs of Eszti.

The first thing you notice is the sheer amount of debris that's been left behind: Empty plastic bottles. Pillows without their cases. A pair of work boots. Trash bags piled in the sink.

They moved out before garbage collection day, hoping to avoid another fine stacked atop the broken lease, the lost deposit, the month's rent half-wasted...

Tiny debts, each magnified and made more impossible by a greater loss.

This is chaos. Whoever was living here moved out in a hurry, but it wasn't tidy, meticulous Eszti.

Dig through the boxes.

You sift through a life packed away in cardboard, the things they thought to take and then left behind anyway.

Old clothes, soft on your hands from repeated washings and cheap detergents. Plastic toys, delight outgrown.

Three people lived here: two adults, a child approaching adolescence.

A woman leans out the open window, shivering in the cool evening air. She tries not to blink. They've had to pack so quickly, this is the first chance she's had to try to memorise the view she's mostly ignored for the last six years.

She takes a quick, hard suck on her cigarette, embers flickering at the end of the filter, and ducks back inside. She doesn't care if the apartment smells like smoke. They'll be gone before the landlord notices.

No jobs left in Portofiro. No money for next month's rent. No future in this place.

Time to move on.

When you know, you know.

In the end, the outcome was the same: a flurry of packing, a quick shuffle of locks and keys in the dark.

They could have tried harder, instead of giving up on it.

The efforts they made to stay didn't leave as much evidence as their flight.

They winnowed down their belongings to what they could sneak out in the night.

How did they choose what to take?

Gut instinct. The first things that sprang to mind as the most important -- and the last things they thought to grab as they crept out the door.

It all happened very quickly, once they'd made the decision to leave. In that moment, the priorities seemed clear.

Approximately 25 items are missing from the count of Operant CASCADE's possessions following her extradition from Portofiro in 91. Due to failure to keep up with requests for a formal inventory, the exact number of CASCADE's lost / forsaken belongings remains officially unknown.

In the night...

Out of their landlord's view, avoiding the creaking stair, the questions.

Look away from the boxes. [Leave.]

You fold back the tops of the cardboard boxes, covering their contents. It won't keep out the dust, or the next person to loot this place, but you do it anyway.

The moving boxes stacked in one corner of the little apartment are not empty, just abandoned.

At some point, somebody tried to paint in here -- roller and tray, sponge caked with a crust of ivory latex -- but gave up before they even covered half a wall.

They knew they weren't getting the deposit back. Why bother.