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Apr. 30th, 2024 02:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nowiammyselfPolaroid pictures peeled off the sliding mahogany closet doors. They sit in a stack on my twin sized bed, on the plaid throw blanket I bought months ago. Polaroid pictures I brought to make this place feel like home, to remind me even in my loneliest of times that somewhere across the sea, hundreds of miles inland from the eastern coast of the united states, there are people that love me, that are waiting for me to come back to them.
What is home? Home is where I've never felt like I belonged. Home is a bedroom with a shut door. Home is the light from the laptop screen lighting up my face, reflecting off my glasses, in a room otherwise dark. Home is a two-bedroom apartment and the green couch I got for a discount from Amazon with the colorful throw pillows I bought from the store I used to work at. Home is the garden with the hammock swinging, with clovers raising up and waiting for me to rip them out of the ground as I swing back and forth in the humid Missouri air under the shade of the towering tree in the yard next door (is it an elm tree? is it birch? one day i'll be back and i'll look it up and I will be able to name the world that I inhabit).
Lately home is an old apartment building, cold tile flooring that always looks dirty no matter how often I sweep and mop, permanently stained with scuff marks and dirt from years of use, from the feet of countless people who called this home before me. Home is the dirty kitchen with perpetually sticky counters and a scraped up stove top. It is a shower that is too small with hot water that lasts maybe five minutes. Home is this tiny room with its tiny window that gives way to the interior patio through which enter the sounds of neighbors - their voices, their appliances, their clattering dishes, their arguments, their music.
White walls adorned with string lights and fake plastic strands of ivy. Dried up bouquets of flowers in empty peanut butter jars and coffee tins. I remove it all little by little, until a month from now when not much of me will remain and it will be a bare boned room with a little angel boy perched on the wall, framed in carved wood painted dark teal, whose eyes watch as the room's inhabitants come and go, and soon I will be going.
How strange it is that this place feels like home, that I've tread the same sidewalks month after month and I've memorized the side streets and the parks and the benches. Memories attached to places that soon I will never see again and that one day I will forget entirely.
What is home? Home is where I've never felt like I belonged. Home is a bedroom with a shut door. Home is the light from the laptop screen lighting up my face, reflecting off my glasses, in a room otherwise dark. Home is a two-bedroom apartment and the green couch I got for a discount from Amazon with the colorful throw pillows I bought from the store I used to work at. Home is the garden with the hammock swinging, with clovers raising up and waiting for me to rip them out of the ground as I swing back and forth in the humid Missouri air under the shade of the towering tree in the yard next door (is it an elm tree? is it birch? one day i'll be back and i'll look it up and I will be able to name the world that I inhabit).
Lately home is an old apartment building, cold tile flooring that always looks dirty no matter how often I sweep and mop, permanently stained with scuff marks and dirt from years of use, from the feet of countless people who called this home before me. Home is the dirty kitchen with perpetually sticky counters and a scraped up stove top. It is a shower that is too small with hot water that lasts maybe five minutes. Home is this tiny room with its tiny window that gives way to the interior patio through which enter the sounds of neighbors - their voices, their appliances, their clattering dishes, their arguments, their music.
White walls adorned with string lights and fake plastic strands of ivy. Dried up bouquets of flowers in empty peanut butter jars and coffee tins. I remove it all little by little, until a month from now when not much of me will remain and it will be a bare boned room with a little angel boy perched on the wall, framed in carved wood painted dark teal, whose eyes watch as the room's inhabitants come and go, and soon I will be going.
How strange it is that this place feels like home, that I've tread the same sidewalks month after month and I've memorized the side streets and the parks and the benches. Memories attached to places that soon I will never see again and that one day I will forget entirely.
