Home

It was first known as ‘the house’, ‘my parent’s place’, ‘back there’, a cage, my prison. Schoolmates used to ask if they could come by and play, when we walked past my door on their way home. Before I run out of excuses, they stopped asking; soon they stopped sharing that walk with me too, and those days would stretch long when I’d return to that place alone, where the air was thickened by silence and music never rang. Some times it would be empty; I sat in my room with guts suspended on a string. The clock ticked on, the string pulled ever tauter, and the solitude became irredeemably desolate.

The second place I shared with a Scottish lad whose name I no longer remembered. He’d leave rubbish in our dorm room until it smelled of rot. I was elected Welfare Officer there – on the campaign promise that I’d deliver condoms to your dorm room door, whenever you need it.

The third place was in a basement of a buffet restaurant. Over the years the smell of grease and the sweat of previous tenants had coalesced into a crust around the mattress. The pillows smelled of stale spring rolls. The only light came from a ceiling window that shrank the world down. There was a communal shower from which you’d emerge dirtier than when you went in. If you stayed long enough, you’d either get pregnant or catch an STD from the air. I was there for two weeks, and mostly slept on a bench on my university campus.

The fourth place was a decrepit stone brick two floors high, but it did have a view of an abandoned parking lot that I shared with a few equally disheveled fruit-flies. The carcass of a bus formed a peculiar whale-fall of sorts. Scavengers had long stripped out the meaty bits. Critters gathered around its rusty bones and left cigarette butts, wet condoms and used needles. But during springtime flowers yellow and blue bloomed out of the cracks in asphalt. It was at times beautiful. Then one day the ground-floor ceiling burst open and poop fell into my cereal.

The fifth place I shared with a post-doc researcher and his stay-at home wife. She gave birth to a boy in my third month there but then developed post-partum depression and I could not bear the sight of her gaunt eyes and straw hair. Sometimes she roamed the house naked with her baby in her arms, weeping. I felt sympathy for her, but I could not stand her. She was my own caged insanity made manifest.

The sixth place I loved. It was on the third floor of an apartment block behind a river, with lofty ceilings as high as my dreams would reach and a brightly lit kitchen that separated from the living room by a large marble counter. I made friends with the bartender at the pub downstairs and occasionally flirted with my neighbor. I ordered so much pizza that Papa John’s made me a pizza taster. Then I got fired on my birthday and moved back to London after 4 months.

The seventh place I maintained for three years, during which my roommates became my best friends and they conceived in my halo a son, and then a daughter. I cleared the weed in the backyard and built a slanted platform for summer barbecues, and it became as close to a home I’d ever known.

Then I came here, and moved 7 times in 5 years, each place a pill box, a coffin, a metaphor, never a home. Because the only thing I brought with me to each place was my medication. Because I thought I’d die in them. Because “the ornament of a home is the friends who frequent it”, and mine was unadorned as the box to hold your ashes.

No. never a home. Because home was not a place. It was a feeling I had never known.

*

I moved into a new place today. Clean and cozy, with a closet big enough to hang my meatsuit and hide the monster.

I met a girl, too. We knew each other for eight month and four days and and she sealed the fault lines on my heart with gold.

For the briefest moment I was unabashedly, unreservedly, unrepentantly me.

Suddenly I wanted a home. Suddenly I ached for a feeling.

I have never had a house guest. I think I’ll start to invite people here and serve them smoothies.

I’m enjoying walking around my home barefoot, enjoying that chilly feeling of naked wood. This is the place I inhabit now. There is nothing between me and it. I’m wearing it like clothes.

The monster rattles his closet sometimes. I’ve locked him in there with my desolation.

A few hours of sunlight managed to squeeze between the high rises that cradled the unit and warm up my windowsill. That’s the thing about light, it finds away.

I think I’ll keep some plants there.