You start to notice what everybody’s door sounds like, and who has what shower habits. This girl misses a party to take a shower, and when she emerges clean and ready we’re all gone. That guy showers once a week if we’re lucky, and he strips down naked in your room first before running through the hall in excitement. Sometimes he’s in there an hour with the lights off, door open, curtain closed. He never uses soap; can’t remember when he last used shampoo. Instead, he rubs his own concoction of Burt’s Bees and lavender all over himself. He always smells.
You’ll know who set off the fire alarm cooking tofu curry at 8:30 a.m., and you’ll learn not to ask why he was cooking such a meal at such an hour. You know the reason tea bags are hanging everywhere is because they apparently taste better the second time, and you’ll know that the freshmen, those fish stick kids who leave the oven on, have adjusted to college when the tea bags disappear and they overdose on coffee. You’ll know who stole your water boiler and who watches Pokemon most nights. You’ve learned the curved shape your palm and fingers make around each broken knob as you use the railing to drag your feet up the stairs. It only takes three weeks to make a home.
Your parents probably call it your home away from home. That’s understandable; you’ve never had a mailing address that wasn’t theirs until now. They think it’s cute, this little room you’ve set up for yourself however-many-miles away from them, because college is just a place you go between holidays. When you’re there you talk of coming home to here, and they laugh it off, they think it’s silly. So you let it slide, and let them think you’re homesick, and all the while you’re forgetting the color of their kitchen curtains. You couldn’t say whether your dad’s hair is parted on the right or left, or if there’s any part at all. Your mom’s hair always seems to be a different length than when you left it, and you can’t say for sure how much has gone gray.
Maybe you feel older in your new, old home, which makes seeing your parents again even stranger. If you’re older, then they’re older too, but your parents aren’t supposed to age. They’re supposed to stay the same, inside the same house you grew up in, with the (yes, you remember now) seasonal hand towels hanging on a rack on that kitchen wall.
The cracked, white tile of the bathroom floor here is not what you grew up with. No family-oriented paintings call out to you from the walls, no patterned shower curtain or toothbrush holder. It’s cold under your feet as you step towards the faucet on the left, the one with a clean stream that wont spray out at you. The overhead light is full of moths. Most are dead. Some you can still hear fluttering around in there, and there’s a huge one bashing itself against the windowpane. Speaking of that window, it’s never closed, and it’s Vermont at night so you’re freezing.
Maybe you’ve stopped caring that here, there isn’t a place where you’re actually alone. You can shut that creaky stall door, but nothing stops your suitemates from poking their feet underneath it. You’re used to people shouting at you while you’re getting clean, and you think it’s too silent without it. You’re used to everyone’s frayed toothbrushes lying on a counter soaked in coffee grounds, and a spotless sink makes you feel like a stranger now. One can get used to anything. Maybe there are people you jokingly call mom and dad here, because in this house there’s a family dynamic for sure. You’re redefining family, redefining home, in order to fit your current situation.
Before I left for a trip to Cambodia, I cleared my room of all the junk and painted the walls white, stripping the space of all my personal connection to it. I packed a suitcase and headed overseas, leaving my parents to finish preparing the house to sell. For my first full week in Southeast Asia, I didn’t contact them once. For the next two weeks, every correspondence between us centered on the question of whether or not they had moved yet. Until I had the time and the funds to spend at an Internet café, I was unsure of where my parents were living. They didn’t end up moving until I came back, but even if they had, I would hardly have been secure in the knowledge that I had a home. I’d only seen the outside of this new house. I knew that it was green, had a small garden with a little stone wall, a pool, a deck, and a bedroom for me with a wall of mirrors. It was a house, but it wasn’t my house, and my other one was gone. When my friends became homesick for their bedrooms with the special posters and pillows and memories of a whole life gathered between four walls, I had nothing to picture for myself. In Connecticut, there were boxes labeled “Naomi—fragile,” “Naomi—bedding,” “Naomi—decorations.” All of it was packed away, and I was in a third world country with five shirts, sunscreen and a journal waiting to be filled. Not one day found me longing to be anywhere else but where I was.
It took a long time for us to realize that home is merely a space you understand. Your parents laugh when you call this home because home is supposed to be the place you grew up, not this place that they don’t understand, and couldn’t. When you were little there was no distinction; you were living and growing up in a home, with a family and a dog or a cat. But these are two different places now. Home, the way your parents think of it, is where you come for the holidays; where they’ve generously allowed an entire room to fill up with objects you no longer carry with you, but can’t yet seem to get rid of. They understand. They did it too, once, many times.
Whether you lived in only one house growing up or you lived in several, you spent an extended amount of time in at least one place. In that place, you know which steps creak when you’re creeping downstairs for food at 1 a.m., and how to avoid it. You know how to count the basement steps in the dark, and which way the water faucets turn. Your brain allowed your muscles to take over. But you’ve spent time away now, and these things are starting to slip from your memory. You remember shapes, colors, the awkwardness of the fridge opening into the entrance of the kitchen, but not which way is best to turn when walking through. Over the phone, your mother talks about rearranging the basement. You try to picture the layout she’s describing—bookshelves, couch, coffee table, TV. You tell her sorry; you’ll see it at Thanksgiving. And come Thanksgiving, you take a couple tries at the water faucets before you understand that they go to the right or the left.
It may not take a trip around the world, but at some point you decide what your essentials are. These days you change your home every three months, so something’s got to go with you. That something doesn’t need to be the orange-colored posters or the familiar wood floor, though they’re nice. You don’t even need to bring your favorite book or bottled collection; these are extra, these are luxuries. The floor will be different wherever you go; what you’ve got is the same set of feet.
It’s simple, but it’s complex. It’s simple because home is any place that makes sense to you. But that place may not be where you actually live, where you brush your teeth, receive mail, take your boots off. Maybe home is some faraway country where you went once, where you couldn’t even say “I like it here” in their language.
So we pack cases. We overstuff duffels, when all we need are our selves. Count up the places you’ve ever called home and see if they fit on only one hand. No? Pack them in the bag, friend, you can bring them with you.
Check your feet—they’re probably not numb. They’ll learn the feeling of a new floor.
