Where Is Home?
“She grew up in a small town
Never put her roots down
Daddy always kept moving, so she did, too.”
Furniture means sticking around. I’ve never loved a place enough to purchase a proper bed frame or a poster to hang on the wall. As I sit in the nearly bare month-to-month bedroom I rent in Los Angeles’ Silver Lake neighborhood, the restlessness of the same nomadic lifestyle I’ve had for the better part of a decade is panting. My parents moved out of my childhood home — a warehouse in an industrial district — during the fall I went away to my first year of college and I have felt uprooted since.
I never put any photos up on the wall of my college dorm room. The school did not allow tape because the adhesive would rip off the paint, so I obliged and kept the walls naked. No string lights. No tapestry. No flashes of moments caught in time of the people I loved or the friends I had. It was clear to me then, as it is now, that I would not be returning to Oregon for any kind of permanence after the school year was over. The Evergreens surrounding the student housing buildings knew this was true as much as I did, so we never caught feelings for one another. When the spring quarter came to an end, I said my goodbyes and never went back in the same way.
I transferred to the university in my hometown of Anchorage. Upon my return, my belongings had been packed up from the childhood home and were ready for a new place. Isn’t it peculiar how quickly our lives can be taken apart and stuffed into cardboard boxes? Some I didn’t bother opening again and still sit in storage, anxiously waiting for the day I come back to those memories and proclaim that I didn’t forsake them, though I have.
The new place — a two-story house in an actual neighborhood — seemed empty. Barren of laughter or the scuffs that decades of children growing in its foundation would promise, I knew that life had changed when my parents moved in. I was stuffed away into a room that had been added on, placed below the staircase and towards the front of the house — it was convenient. My mom would pester me about paint colors, but I never found the energy or care to change the hue of the walls there. To this day, they sit in beige and the mattress I put on a simple box spring sits in a corner. I haven’t been there in months.
At some point, my legs felt too long for a place like Anchorage. I wanted out and away. Without incident, I hastily left and the room I was staying in was abandoned plain once more.
I would make my place in new neighborhoods. I put in the labor and time to know where I was within a town or city, but never enough to make it home. Friendships mirrored my impermanence. I would not buy furniture, no less actually put effort into a relationship that would no doubt end when I decided my time there was over. Chicago, Sydney, New York, Portland. Cities filled with people who buy couches and have the faintest memory of me: the girl at the café or the nail salon or the YMCA. More or less, I was a flash in the pan face; someone who became a fixture and then was gone for good. I would walk the streets, know where the cracks snaked their directions in the pavement, and then return to whatever bedroom I was borrowing. It became what I knew.
In Australia, I lived with two girls; one Kiwi and the other English, our voices echoing different accents through the halls we paid too much to habitat. Chicago found me living in the guest bedroom of my uncle’s home. Various long-term hotels and Airbnbs were my home base throughout New York, Los Angeles, and Miami over the years. When I moved back to Sydney, I lived with an agent and her drug-addicted grown son. With my bags packed, I actually bolted out of that apartment when it became too scary to stay. A good friend let me live in the spare bedroom of a mansion she and her boyfriend lived in at the time (to date, EASILY the best place I lived). And then the beige, barren bedroom of my parents’ home in Alaska.
I read a quote recently that said, “at some point, you get tired of being vulnerable on the internet and just want a cute apartment”. As I climb higher into my 20s, I want nothing more than an apartment that looks like it was virtually stolen off some influencer’s Instagram page. I want the creams and pastels and the warmth and the candles. And yet, when I see a plane overhead, I think of the girl I used to be and the seat up there that is now occupied by some other girl with big dreams.
A man I could probably marry lives some thousands of miles away in Asia. The idea of cohabiting with him and the genesis of a new adventure entices me like I’m 21 again. I look around my bare month-to-month apartment and realize how feasible it would be to pack everything up. Surely it would only be a few boxes that I would leave in storage and forget about. But this time is different. This time I’m different.
Packages from Wayfair land on the doorstep. My Amazon wish list holds hope of couches and jewelry holders. The money that was once spent on airfare now goes into a fund for frivolous vanities and cleaning supplies. I bought a rug. A RUG. Somewhere my feet can land at the end of the day. I lived in one other apartment in Los Angeles before the one I live in now and it was a living hell, but still livable. I had become conditioned to living in toxic environments with a bag packed. Like anyone living in this city, I was ready to run.
One move changed my entire perspective. My suitcases sit empty in my closet. I’ve cashed in the life of drifter and put my roots down here. Furniture means sticking around. I built a chair the other day, so I could sit and breathe: this is my home.
