Home

I am walking under the late afternoon sun. There are no clouds in the sky. The pavement is full of cracks, filled with yesterday’s rain. In between the cracks live tangerine trees, with their fruit scattered around the ground. The air smells like a mix of jasmine and pollution, the same pollution making the sky glow in all my favorite colors. A church bell rings from far away.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what home is recently. Maybe because I spent a week in my parents’ place, and realized I’m not sure I can call it home. I’m not sure I’ve been able to call it home in a long time. The air flowing inside it is a weird mixture of gasses, part comfort, part suffocation. It drugs me, puts me in an altered state of mind, one of someone I am not anymore. I am overcome with idleness, a sense of restriction of movement, a sense that my voice needs more effort to come out of my mouth than usual. Most of my stay is spent in my room, I guess because it’s the only place in that house that once felt mine, protected, free. There is no need to be brave in this home anymore, but the heart has muscle memory.

I am not the person that this hallucinatory air makes me, but she still lives inside me. She comes out sometimes, even when we are not at that house. She is the one who looks at people and sees disdain in their eyes by default, the one who thinks everyone knows how to live but her. I know that all she wants is to be herself, loudly, and for that to be okay. I’m trying to let her do it more, but she still needs me to hold her hand while she’s doing it. When I’m in that altered state, I cannot be there for her, not enough.

No, this is not home, even when it’s safe. At home, I should be soft, not alert. I can have the sound of who I am sound loudly, and not have to hide it in headphones. At home, we can all have space and we can all have boundaries and we know we don’t have to break them to be loved. A home is sturdy, not flimsy, and it cannot collapse from one moment to the next. I still hold this house dear, but I know it’s not home.

I have known for some time. My adult life has been a quest to build a home; a home where all of me can exist; a home that doesn’t destroy itself.

The sky gets darker. I see Cassiopeia, or I see Orion’s belt. The moon is almost full. Cat eyes glow in the midst of the darkness. I start running, and a salty breeze caresses my hair. Cold waves are gently touching my feet. I hear guitar and laughter from a distance.

I have been naive enough to try to build a home in other people. They let me into their hearts, and they once felt as warm and cozy as a home should be. I found there was space for me to exist there, to be loud and silly, to dance and to rest. I had a room in other people’s hearts and I gave them a room in mine. They gave me their sweaters and t-shirts to sleep in and I always had an extra towel cleaned if they needed to shower. I left my dirty plates in their kitchen and they made my bed covers messy.

These were not really new homes though; they were mere guest rooms. It was hard to remember that, especially when their walls were made of cardboard, not cement, and they were prone to collapse. Without a wall, there was no difference left between my room and the rest of the house. We would build them back, but every time our work was more careless, so they kept breaking, more and more easily. We grew more tired with every repair, until we stopped trying. Without walls, the guest room seemed to be just part of the house. This unity of destruction brought a comfort, a sense of belonging that made me forget to ever leave and go back to my own place. After all, I had put much more effort into this room, so why bother?

But nobody likes a guest that squats in their house, and I tend to overstay my welcome.

Once, I realized it on my own, packed my stuff and left. That time, it was a house by the beach, always hit by the sun. It had a garden with a hammock, but if you laid there for too long, wasps would appear just to annoy you. If you were lucky, you would instead be visited by one of the cats that were prancing around, and they would lay on your lap. When I left, I knew I could not live there again, I had lived there for way too long. I changed the number of this place in my phone from “Home” to “No”. When some time passed, I happened to briefly visit again, got to spend a fun night with friends. It felt nice exactly because I did not live there anymore, because it was a house I could just visit and not lose myself in it.

Another time, though, I didn’t realize on time, and I got kicked out. It was a beautiful house, built in the middle of a forest, in the midst of old oak trees. It had an attic with a skylight, like I had always dreamed of having since I was a kid. The kitchen smelled like freshly baked cookies. There was always music playing and the temperature was exactly as warm as it should be. But one day, there was an immense flood, so big that the oak trees fell down. After it passed through, the house slowly became unlivable; there was cracks and mold on the walls. The oven had stopped working, the music had stopped playing, the heating was malfunctioning and made everything so cold that the floor froze. And yet, I somehow turned a blind eye to it. I even begged to stay in that cold house that had no room for me anymore; I was so scared to be homeless.

And yet, I was not.

I had my own home, in my own heart. It was dusty and broken -I hadn’t lived there for so long.

The streets are filled with leaves. They are falling from trees that were colored by a brushstroke that mixed carelessly red and yellow paint. Cold air dances on my cheeks, but my hands are warm. I am walking with a fast, steady stride.

My first days back to that place, I spent laying on my suitcase on the floor. Nothing to cover myself with, nothing soft to lay on, but I was too numb to feel how hard and cold the floor was. The living room was white and completely empty, besides a very old TV standing in its midst. It was barely getting signal, but it was playing this TV show that aired when I was a kid. I sat there days on end doing nothing but watching it, and at some point it was over, but it looped back to the start. I knew what was happening; it would keep looping forever. I would just lay there, trapped in that loop, until I knew every single line that would be spoken in the next seconds and there would be no surprises at all.

It would be easy to choose the loop. It would also be easy to leave this home as empty as it was and try to find another one, already furnished, to crash in. But I knew that I had no right to build a home in other people’s hearts. I could visit them, I could rent a room, but I could not make them my home. They did not belong to me; all I could do is appreciate them for as long as they let me -and for as long as it was good for me.

I got up and turned the TV off.

There was my home right here, waiting to be built.

Even when I try to build my own homes, I have a tendency to leave them half finished. Homes that I only partially live in, homes I abandon and keep for brief, periodic visits. I think it’s because I make the same mistake with all of them; I build them for perfection instead of livability. Perfection is an unstable material to build walls out of, and for them to not collapse, they always demand that I give them a sacrifice. I do it, because I need a place to live in; because that’s all I’ve known from the places I’ve lived in. But they’re not satisfied; they keep demanding more and more, and I keep giving it all. I keep making sacrifices even when they don’t ask for it, because I expect the demand will come.

This home I am building now, instead, is quiet. It doesn’t demand anything from me, and I’m trying not to default to sacrifice for it. I know now that I should use sturdier materials. My hands are filled with cement, my feet tired from carrying it. I found that the home was much less empty than I thought, but what it had was not furniture for me to use for living. It was drawings from my childhood, notebooks with half finished stories, the CDs my dad used to play in his car and a few plushies. It’s alright; I started building my own furniture from scratch. I find it more fun than I expected, even when I get frustrated because I just can’t find the right screws.

The city I am building the home in is cold, dark, grey and chaotic, but to me it feels quiet and peaceful. I don’t know for how long I will keep the home here, but it is now the one place with enough of the space that I need to build it. Yes, this home will be based in no particular country. Its materials are such that it doesn’t have to. It’s built of stars and jasmine and sunsets and autumn trees and from the matter of my own heart. I am lucky enough that I can have these mostly anywhere.

When the home is built, I will have people over. Maybe I’ll even give some of them rooms, and we will have dinner parties and sleepovers. There will be music and paintings and the smell of fresh food. I will have a corner where I will sit on a comfy chair and write stories. The air will smell like all the flowers it’s decorated with and it won’t have any suffocating gases floating around. The walls will be made from the strongest concrete in the world and will demand no pain to stay in place. It will be a home that doesn’t hurt; It will be a home I won’t need to leave.