home

This came out of a prompt from M. Tamara Cutler's substack, That Place You Love. It's an interesting and engaging community of storytelling, and when I manage to open my emails close to when I receive them, I'm always excited to see where her prompts take me.

I think I have a whole book on home brewing inside of me. Maybe someday.

If you asked me to draw my childhood home today, I’d draw a coffin. Maybe a mausoleum, although there’s something homey about those (thanks, Buffy). And for me, home was not homey, not cozy, not safe and welcoming. The two homes of my youth are bleak and airless in my memory, shallow graves where I felt simultaneously alone and smothered.

When my husband asks me how I feel about buying the house we’re currently renting, I can’t speak around the ghosts in my throat. I don’t know what it is to make a home. Everywhere I’ve lived, I’ve come to feel trapped in, repulsed by myself — my impulsive purchases and my tendency to hoard in hopes of embodying some quilted image of Prepared Adult, my enraged aversion to cleaning, the disconnect between my vision and execution.

My husband sees a home in this house. It's not just this house, either. Even in empty plots of land, he imagines a future of building and tinkering. It's like he's gazing into the crystal ball and seeing our future, while all I can do is stare at my own reflection, shrunken and inverted, stuck in glass I can't break.

When we moved, I pictured myself on the adventures I’d dreamed of. A new city every few months, my feet dusty from exploring, flitting like dandelion fluff rather than rooting into any one spot. I didn’t expect to long for the ground.

We squeezed what we could into six jumbo suitcases, and I surprised myself with my attachment to our things. They meant little to me in the apartment they’d cluttered for the past five years. But almost two years after we traded our NYC 2-bed for a beachfront casita, I miss our photos on the walls, my books, the clothes I shoved into the trashcan hours before our flight. I miss our food scale, still picture its blue light shining through the garbage bag like a feeble voice crying out as we re-weighed each suitcase.

I know (I tell myself) that home is not a food scale. We can hang our photos, find new favorites. We know (we tell ourselves) that we can bring home, make home. The six suitcases are empty but whenever I’m surprised by something we didn’t bring, I want to open them and search the corners, collect whatever fragments of the familiar remain like dust pressing into the crevices of my skin.

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xo, Priscilla