home

at a time for me where ideas of what home and family is, and means, undergoes a metamorphosis around me, lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of home, in particular what makes somewhere feel like home, how ideas of home change and evolve, how one creates new homes, and what this means for previous homes in terms of change, memory, time, and truth. 

I re-watched the film garden state not long ago, about this guy who returns to his childhood home after his mom dies. He says this really great thing about what home actually means, or at least how it changes after you leave:

You know that point in your life when you realise the house that you grew up in isn't really your home anymore? All of a sudden even though you have this place where you put your shit that idea of home is gone.

Sam: I still feel at home in my house.

You'll see when you move out. It just sort of happens one day, one day and it's just gone. And you can never get it back. It's like you get homesick for a place that doesn't even exist. I don't know maybe it's like this rite of passage, you know. You won't have this feeling again until you create a new idea of home for yourself. It's like a cycle or something. I miss the idea of it. Maybe that's all family really is. A group of people who miss the same imaginary place.

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Though in this passage he’s talking about returning to your childhood home and not leaving it, I really love the notion of getting “homesick for a place that doesn’t even exist” and also  “Maybe that’s all family really is. A group of people who miss the same imaginary place”

STUFF ME AND SAS TALKED ABOUT ON NEW YEARS RE: FAMILY 

the bizarre notion of spending such an abundance of time with people you have no choice over  /  remembering you're the literal SPAWN of your mother and father / not scratching the surface yet at times feeling this intrinsic connection /swinging between disillusionment and being one of the same / accepting you'll never understand a big part of them but being grateful to understand just a small part / family+authenticity_________ / 

And although I’d like to think of family as something more, that family means love and support and and togetherness and memories and history and knowing someone in-this-way-like-no-other yada yada...amidst the separation of my parents and my dads lack of permanent home and all this movement happening, the idea of us being bound together by one imaginary place does have a ring of truth to it. So, no the house in which I grew up is not the same place as the house in which I live now, where a new man sleeps and shits. But time n time again, we come back here reaching for an idea no longer complying with now, somehow tethered to this pile of bricks that (close-or-far-as-we-stray) we come back to from time-to-time to say hello, feeding the incessant habit of this group of people we so-often seem to run into.  And I can tell my dad hates being here now, that when he's here to get aurora or to sit through an obligatory monthly meal my mom insists upon it's like this reminder of things before, except there's something sickeningly rotten about this pantomime-past feigned as happy-present. "The house needs to go! It's crumbling around us!" And now I realise i’ve never seen him this spiteful. The big giveaway is all his silence. You can tell there's really nothing nice to say about this place anymore, this ghost life taunting him from the grave. I can see it in the way he hovers at the door, the constant shuffling discomfort, always lingering in my room, never really getting comfortable enough to spend more than a minute in one spot. The house, to my mom, is like, this last slither of what we had when we were the nuclear family, when we were happy, when we were kids. And in some ways it is. She's really into the idea of a family home. It's old-fashioned, but unsurprising. Most of all, for me this place means familiarity, safeness, knowingness. The security of seeing the same shapes and colours around me like the've always been: I breathe in the certainty of it and it feels good. I often find myself talking about the things i love as these strange appendages, but, thinking about how protected I feel here,  home truly does becomes this...like...third limb. 



And when I consider the house I’ve grown up in, I look around at the walls and the corners and the shape of the rooms and everything in it, and it’s hard to explain what about it means so much. Sometimes I try pinpoint one edge or piece of furniture or memory that makes this collection of objects worth so much feeling, so I might just pick up that one thing and take it with me, holding hostage this small cosmos in a jar and never letting it escape till the day I die. I try think of moments when I fell in love with this place. That back then, swimming about in its nowness I truly believed yes, this is it, this is mine, this place is forever, it has to be, only because I love it here so much, and because I'm happy, and because it would be a crime to not protect this relic of everything that's ever happened to me until the end of time, just so I never have to part with it, -so it never fades!  

I wonder what it's like for kids who've moved about their whole lives, how they stay grounded, how they feel safe at all, ever. i'm probably being dramatic or maybe all people who’ve grown up in one place forever feel this romantic and so goddam wretched about not knowing the future of the one-and-only-regularity-of-living-as-you’ve-known-it. Either way, I can’t help but think what’ll happen to all the history here when the indisputable touch-and-feel of the present collects itself into a bitter pool of longing, and memories bob like jellyfish into the then, becoming specks of dust against a spray of ungovernable nowness :-( 



Home is one of those things that at the time you believe could never cease to exist, with no regard to however long you stay away. In truth, I feel I'll never really been able to appreciate this space in which I’ve spent most my life, and even now, still being here, and despite my efforts to prolong it's death in documenting it all: rehearsing the memories to re-tell myself the story of our lives, i have no clue how to salvage all this! I can't even attempt to appreciate what this place means to me, or preserve any part of it! In the end it'll disappear into the ether in the way that truth and memories do, and the loss of home will hit me in only the exact moment from which it's just out of reach.

When I think about the future, I imagine parts of home in the body of another place, and picture this frankenstein-like-home, picked apart and put back together.  I wonder about life when my childhood home isn’t ‘home’ anymore. I can see it eating away at me like a bad break-up where you decide on a clean break and commit to never interfering with each-other’s existences again (despite spending every waking hour fawning over what they look like these days or what they might be doing). Like how will i pass my street when i don't live there anymore? There was a point in which I thought I’d be okay with leaving here. I thought to myself. You need change! You’ve never had to deal with change in your life! This will be good for you! But I can already feel the hurt of it creeping up on me. And hurt it will! It's funny how romantic the mundane becomes with time. Like if you just stared at a really ugly brick wall for long enough you might fall in love. I swear if my house wasn't my house, from the outside I'd want nothing to do with it, you know? Like, moving around, passing places in London, a lot of the time everything feels so drab and uninviting from the outside, and I imagine in my head if I were to see a picture of each place, and under i see the text, would you want to live here? And I think hell no! But then again that's someone's home and I think that's the most endearing thing about London. For the most part it's so grey and ugly but looking it and knowing what it looks like and still being filled up with so much love you might explode is like, so strangely lovely. I've tried to think about the things I love about my own home that make it this way to me, but I don't think I could quite do it justice. I could list the things that I remember, but it would be like a child's drawing from memory, you know, the kind where the sun is huge and all that. 

And change scares me but I'm glad for it. i have no doubts this is how things need to be! I'm glad my parents aren't together and all the movement and everything. But lately waking up at my dad’s new place is like a sleepover at a new who you barely know's friends house, or like when you crash somewhere after a party, and creeping around the next morning feels like you’re haunting the memory of the night before. In ‘my so called life’ Angela says that: stepping into someone's house for the first time is like entering another continent. And though this place feels more a small country than continent, for me even a trip to the loo is done with the caution of someone trespassing. And, continuing the notion of staying over at a new friends place...at this point in your acquaintance, it's weird to sleep in said person’s bed. Moreover, there’s this glaring temporality to the makeshift bed or lack of sheets that serve as a reminder of the fact of not getting too comfortable, even the ritual of reinstating the sofa within its original context becoming a testament to your impermanence, like an added piece of furniture that makes no sense with the rest of the room.

It’s not that I don’t feel welcome in my dads new home, or that i cease to exist here, because such a claim could be disputed by the abundance of photos of me all over the shelves and walls, but that, much like the notion of being a visitor in someone else’s house, there's little essence of familiarity that points towards any sense of me truly belonging here. Upheld by my physical absence, (I’ve only slept here 2 or 3 times so far), and further, because the place is so small in terms of living space, space to breath, move, etc, I don’t see it as somewhere to do much more than sleep or seek shelter when nearby; for what's there really to do, in terms of functionality, at least compared to my bedroom where I have everything I could want and need? And though you could argue in reality that I get up to as little if not less in my own room at my own house, it's a fact that you’ll always choose what you know over what you don’t. And besides a place is only as good as the good times spent there. As long as it functions only as a place I pass through from time to time, I don’t know if I'll ever be able to call my dad’s home.

More than the simple lack of history: the not-yet-fulfilled-time here, the newness, in the end, ironically it’s more the literal notion of all my stuff being elsewhere. Everything i own, all my memories, necessities, not being present, objectively render me a sister, a daughter, but most of all a coming-and-going foil in the lives of those who do inhabit this narrative. Rather than a character who has their own sort of tangible identity in this space, who has room to grow and evolve, my existence here feels somewhat of a stand in, or at least someone who knows they’re only going to stay for a while, before they get on with the real world. While my old home feels like a museum, this one feels like playing dress up in the lives of people I can never truly be a part of, not like how it was before, not like when i was a kid, especially not when I still have one foot in my country of origin. I've gotten so used to myself as the visiting daughter, the temporary stand-in I think it’s hard for me now to be a permanent feature. And I'm telling my dad this, and he’s just read what i wrote about home and I’m rolling my eyes and i sigh but he’s crying like a baby and i’m smiling. He says something about how great I am and how i'm just there and i somehow fill this space in your heart and i laugh and make a dumb comment about how i’m an air sign, half joking. I think, for the most part, things are good.