THE FIRST HOME:
The first home exists in primary colours. Everything is blue, red, green, images are blurry, like the lingering memories of a dream. A backyard ran for miles: green, green, green. Zucchini and squash grew from the soil in enormous size and a trampoline in the backyard taught me how to fly. I played all day in my plastic kitchen beside the towering seats of our dining table, I decorated canvases with the smears of my paint coated bare hands. In this home, everything was still possible. Everything was new then, everything was the first.
THE ORIGIN HOME:
The origin home is where I was raised. The walls bare, the floors dust, before we built the house into our home. Bedrooms were shared, shifted, shared and separated. Summer days were spent floating in a pool that felt like the size of an ocean, cold winters were spent lingering in front of scorching fireplaces. Time became clearer, memories more real. Age was born in this house, time was felt.
It became home to friends whom I loved and let go, to lovers who could never use the front door. Laughter, tears, heartbreak and joy lived in the lining of the walls. The same artwork lined the corridor for years, the same pottery on the hallway cabinet. I could walk through the house in the pitch-black night and know my path in perfect proximity. I couldn’t imagine ever knowing something as closely as I knew this home.
The house grew smaller and colder as I grew older. With age, the cracks in the walls began to show. The wooden beams in the doorways could no longer hold the force of slammed doors. The wallpaper could no longer conceal the words of hurt carved into the walls. Family rooms became untouched and unfamiliar as presence dwindled.
I searched for home in other places. Other people, other spaces. Some would offer me cups of tea and afternoon records, some a place on the couch and company to the dentist. But none ever felt perfectly right, none ever felt like home.
THE CHOSEN HOME:
The home I chose saved me. A house born a century before I, awaiting my presence all along. I first met her in the midst of winter, her strong bricks keeping us sound inside, her corridors carrying the smell of pumpkin soup through the halls. During that first dinner, I knew I wanted her to hold me. I wanted her to be a space, a place, in my life.
She opened her arms to me in early September. Making space for the photos on my walls and the lamps on my bookshelves. She taught me how to be held, sheltered, encompassed, as I grew within her walls. She is the most honest relationship I know, the most equal I have possessed. I clean her skirting boards and she keeps me out of the cold. I wipe her benches and she runs me warm water from the faucet.
She held me when I feel to my knees in heartbreak on her doorstep in October, she surrounded me when I washed her kitchen compulsively for three days in December. She has listened to me love and break, she has listened to me laugh and long within her walls. She has seen me run out the door for the bus in the morning and sluggishly make my way back home through her door at night.
She lets me grow like the foliage that lines her garden walls, she supports me whole with her stable foundations. No home has known me as intimately as her. No home has ever witnessed my life as closely.
She offers me a space, a place, as I learn how to belong. As she teaches me shelter, as she teaches me love, as she teaches me home.
I went to a concert the night that I finished writing this piece, the artist concluded the set with his final song “House Song”. I sobbed my way through every lyric.