At various points in my life, home has encompassed everything and nothing. Up until age of 6, home started and finished within the my bedroom walls, a universe where reality was merely a stumbling block on the road to infinite possibility. I enacted elaborate and passionate scenes in which I played both hero and villain: sometimes an impoverished orphan relegated to forage in barren forests, other times a tyrannical queen tasked with punishment through violent words and the occasional hurled object. Whether I was accompanied by my solemnly obedient 3-year old brother or a handful of imaginary friends did not matter; I was company enough for myself.
As I grew older, home expanded to include vast stretches of Hyde Park and Daisy’s house. Daisy’s house was 4 stories of crash and clutter a full 45 minutes drive away from my family’s apartment (and therefore in another world entirely). Proud black lettering above the front door declared it a “Symposium Institute,” which imbued a sense of authority simply because I didn’t know what it meant. It is her home and not mine that I recall with English fondness; her home with its “lottie” (the allotment, or vegetable garden), its parakeets in vast cages, its apple crumbles and milky tea. The make-believe of Symposium Institute more closely mimicked reality than my former childish play: an enduring favorite of ours was “shop,” a game that involved rearranging all of Daisy’s belongings into elaborate storefront displays. Whereas my curation always resembled the local corner store, Daisy assembled veritable boutiques, and I both loathed and adored her for it. Symposium Institute and its acres of shops were where chaos and order co-existed perfectly to conjure a warmth that was, to my 10 year old self, the very essence of Home.
By age 15, home appeared to have shrunk quite unexpectedly to tuck itself into the smallest of pockets beneath my ribcage. I spackled my eyelids with peacock shadow and wandered London’s streets eyes downcast, crossing perpetually cold fingers that my teenage armor would nurture a latent home of sorts. In the quietest hours of morning, I curled into window ledges and chain-smoked cigarettes, scouring my wrist, my neck, my chest for a thudding beat. Home seemed an aching black hole that made me wonder whether I existed at all.
And then the departure. I orchestrated an elaborate London goodbye that involved a picnic, nightclubs, and watermelon margaritas. I clutched at school friends and vowed to visit, write, and return, embarrassed by the tears to which I could muster only an apologetic stare. Later that night in my empty bedroom, I threw myself onto the carpet and sobbed uncontrollably -- mourning in part the loss of those glorious women, in part the loss of my childhood home, but mostly the sheer absence of any sense of loss at all. Ironically, I would re-enact this scene 7 years later following the sale of my childhood home, and feel profoundly in that moment that I had lost everything.
On a California college campus, home is nowhere to be found. The memory of that place oceans away softened with distance and time, and for years I clung to it as a rosy talisman of comfort. I return to London intermittently where I’m forced to acknowledge that I Am Grown, and Real Life must be accommodated as more than a slight inconvenience. I seek refuge on the empty stages and black box spaces of the Drama Department, sometimes alone, other times in an awkward rat pack of players, each of us uniquely homeless and heartbroken.
It’s around that time that I discover and relish the freedom of feeling uprooted. Homelessness becomes an integral part of my selfhood, and my ever-changing state of mind a refuge. I study the novels of Virginia Woolf, and Home is a gossamer evening in The Ramseys’ garden. I attend a lecture on Magical Realism, and Home is invisible cities and ancient curses. I throw myself wholeheartedly into the absurdity of a Ionesco play and lose enough of my grip on reality that I sink into a post-production depression. I spend hours alone in ghost-lit rehearsal spaces poking at each corner of a 2 minute monologue, always reluctant to leave come midnight. Home became everything I allowed into my consciousness, and I therefore anything I chose it to be.
And then 22: Home is a man, and his name is Daniel. Our first makeshift apartment has an air peculiar to the perennially homeless and transplanted: fevered and clutching; every single object and event is imbued with epic significance. Breakfast making and laundry become life-or-death activities, where a sideways glance or misinterpreted comment could lead to threats of abandonment followed by dramatic pleas for forgiveness. Home is both teenage passion and painfully adult, and I ebb for years between states of euphoria and despair. In intermittent moments of peaceful calm life stands still: I am loved, and I feel like I am everything.
And now, 27. Home is the bottom half of a Victorian building that I have inhabited, alone, for nine days. It is the imposing photograph of Big Ben that guarded my childhood bed and now presides over my empty living room. It is the mattress purchased with and slept in by the man who was my home for my early twenties -- and retains to me still an unparalleled sense of safety and comfort. It is broken dresser-drawers, books whose pages I inhabited for weeks at a time, and leaky pens -- the ghosts of jobs past. It is the clackety armchair I purchased for 50 dollars from my neighbor's garage sale. It is a stranger’s chandeliers and fridge, and my mother’s blue and white china.
I carry these homes with me, and all I am now is everything they have ever been.
