Home Is Something I Can't Describe

Letters to the Ether: S1E1

Dear whomever,

All the way on the other side of the world, you’ll find an apartment on the third floor of a building that sits just at the curve of a hill. Across from it, like a painting: a field of olive trees. If you glance out at the right moment, just before nightfall, the sunset paints the sky the color of dreams.

That apartment is littered with me, of incomplete projects and paint splotches and scratches on furniture – soon, it will be molded and fabricated, changed. Rooms will be opened to others, the furniture I slept and sat and ate and cried on, discarded to be replaced with better things to suit different people. I tell myself this is something out of my hands – that to be alive means to be erased, eventually. But the idea, of course, is painful.

On the second of February, I reversed a 2015 Nissan Leaf out from the garage, for what was most likely the final time I would ever do so - I remember feeling, deeply, that this was an ending to something. A chapter - maybe a book - closed and placed on the shelf. Rarely, over the course of my life, had I indulged in the word “home”. I moved too often for it to be an option, an addition to my vocabulary. In hindsight, I wish I had said a better goodbye. I wish I had known what I was leaving behind.

Today, and most days, I find myself longing for the clicks of that car, the low hum of its engine, the parking space it sat in through the night. Upstairs, there is an uneven patch of wood flooring to the left edge of the hallway. Paint dirties the curves of the floors because we’d forgotten to clean them off while still wet. All these broken, dirty things are what I remember most vividly and most fondly about that place.

When you love something, I’ve learned, you bask in its flaws. You allow them, romanticize them. It’s like when you stop speaking to someone, you miss their chatter, the annoying reminders of who they are.

A part of me enjoys these nostalgic feelings. I excuse my constant melancholy with being a writer or a literature major or, occasionally, a romantic. I have always found myself nostalgic, at the end of the day, for something just out of my reach. It’s a familiar, tasteful feeling – a reminder of who I am. I look at things backwards, I link a current moment with something in the past. Everything is so much lovelier when it has passed you by, I think - when you can understand all aspects of it all fully - that is a moment I am truly craving. I’d like to flip through my journal, look at the pages dating back to this month, and think: I guess it all worked itself out in the end.

It always does, no?

It’s overwhelming when the world opens up around you. I graduate college, then move to the other end of the planet. This side of the world is bigger - even the sky feels further away. And in realizations like that, I crave the smallness of that apartment and the familiarity of its walls.

People always try to tell you that home is not a place, not a set of walls, but something else entirely. Other people, usually. I have an incomplete argument in my mind that home must be a place; of course it does! We need that fixed spot we can go back to, no matter what. The same bed every night. Somewhere that’s yours and only yours. Where you can take off the day and sit without it all, but this seems something either too obvious to say aloud or useless in its entirety.

In an attempt to remain positive - I suppose home must be the mess on your nightstand in your friend’s guest room or the book your lover annotated for you taking up a little too much space in your suitcase. You’ll leave a hoodie behind in your sister’s home and a t-shirt in your brothers’ apartment just to keep that book - that piece of someone you loved - with you. Crocheted flowers, a birthday gift. Letters, journals, a gifted bookmark. Pieces of what-once-was, reminders of something that could be. One day, a shelf full of books. One day, a photo album for this stack of pictures. One day, a vase, for the flowers.

I’m sure it’s normal for post-graduation life to feel like a murky, hazy dream, where your legs are suddenly heavier than the rest of your body. To be jet-lagged on the other end of the world is another story, surely. But here I am, replacing clothes with gifts and journals in this little suitcase of mine - little tidbits of love I have collected from back home. Here I am, holding on to what’s familiar. Here I am, clutching a journal that dates back to 2020, reminding myself that I can always go back to the words, if must be, to remind myself who I was, in case I ever forget.

I know - I am lucky to have seen so much of the world.

The good news is that I’ll probably remember to enjoy the ins and outs of a daily, boring routine much more the next time I’m subjected to it. We tend to forget to make the mundane, systematic parts of life special. To truly, deeply, feel and enjoy them. We just want to get through things - to fast forward to the end, to the rest, to the vacation, maybe. Then, that moment comes and goes, and we’re standing on the other side, dazed and returning to “reality”.

So, reader, perhaps you’re feeling bored within your daily routine - a nine to five, a tight university schedule, a series of family events, whatever it may be – try to bask in it. In the ease of knowing what you’re doing tomorrow, where you’ll be, where you’ll end up when the sun goes down. Take a moment, and breathe it all in. For me.

We always want what we can’t have, after all.

Thank you for reading.