Spencer Street

i can come home

It took me a while to start calling this place home. We’d bought a condo and were in the process of making embryos when I finally asked for a set of keys; I think P hadn’t offered them to me earlier because it hadn’t occurred to him that I didn’t have a set. Everything about everything had been so easy, even deciding to buy property, even deciding to make embryos, that something like keys just never came up. When I asked for them, I tried to make a joke, like “haha sorry to pressure you, or, don’t want to pressure you, but, do you think I could have a set of keys?” But maybe I made the joke or the “joke” because even though we’d bought property and were making embryos, there’s something even more intense about turning one person’s home into two people’s. 

Even then, having keys to here was supposed to be mostly temporary, while we spent maybe a month or two renovating our place. Except that the renovation got stalled for various boring and exciting reasons, and so now it’s been seven months of living in this one-room studio and trying to call it my home. 

I write about architecture because of what my friend calls my inescapable longing for home, bro, and because I never really felt at home, anywhere, because I moved around a lot as a kid and had a lot of rupture in my family and home life, and so even admitting that I live here has felt like an extraordinary commitment At first, I didn’t want to make any waves, so I just kept my stuff in storage. Then at some point I realized that I really wasn’t feeling good so I talked to an energy healer, one of many I talk to, and she said I needed a space. I needed to take up space. So then I got a desktop and now, I just take more space. 

One of the hardest things for me is taking up physical space in other people’s homes, even when it’s supposed to be my home. I had a series of relationships where the other person had a stable life and a stable home and I sort of washed ashore, often with little more than a suitcase, having abandoned everything else i’d ever owned, and there were at least two breakups I went through where I moved out and afterward the place looked basically the same as it had when I’d lived there. 

P is out of town for six weeks, at a metalworking residency in Penland. I’m happy for him, and I’m also happy for me because I get to occupy this space now, on my own, though with our cattle dog named Boo, and I can feel things start to shift. I’ve put more books in the pile of books that started as just two books I bought at Spoonbill & Sugartown on a Saturday afternoon two months into our relationship and is now closer to sixty. I’ve filled the fruit basket with New Yorkers and Xian Famous Foods chili oil packets. Last month, I asked P if I could replace the shower curtain, and he said yes, and I chose the shower curtain, and even just adding one object, because it’s one that we see every day and interact with every day, shifted the energy. 

He’s lived here for twenty years. Sometimes I think about all the other people he’s loved who’ve lived in this space or encountered it with him, and sometimes that makes me feel sad and jealous and resentful and insecure and all the normal things that generally monogamous people feel when they realize that the people that they love have loved others before, in different ways than they love us, but lately I’m trying to have it make me feel generous and expansive and grateful. I feel the traces of all the ways he practiced loving people before he got to me, and it reminds me of all the ways I got to practice before I got to him. I joke that I needed a bad first marriage so I can have a good second one, eventually, but it’s not really a joke. I did need it. 

Being here by myself makes it easier to imagine our partnership and all the ways in which it will grow. Being here by myself makes me become even more and ever more familiar with all the little moments, the places, the things he set in motion years ago. It’s also sweet because we’re about to change it, because he suggested that we move things around, make it really work for two people, one of whom needs silence and one of whom likes noise, one of whom loves the dark and one of whom thrives in the light. I can come home.