“My home is such a powerfully imaginative place that the space is almost irrelevant. I think the house I live at on the Hudson is where I belong because it's the only place where I am that I never think about when I'm leaving.”

-Toni Morrison

A Place & A Space?

I have spent the last year just about anywhere and everywhere besides home. I cherish home and tie abundant value and comfort to the idea of home, like most, yet being everywhere but home forced me to consider what exactly home means. This is a cliche question and maybe a cliche topic, but constantly being on the move, as I have been, justifies my diving into it, maybe? For context, I have spent an average of five nights at home each month this year. 

This home I speak of is an overpriced duplex apartment in the East Village decorated with objects that aren't mine nor my style. I say that not as a jab at my roommate, whose stuff it is, but to paint the picture of the lack of ownership and reflection of self I associate with the place. In a city like New York, buried in a chaotic neighborhood like the East Village, this is where I seek refuge and a form of peace and quiet despite the constant sounding of alarms outside my window and the barking of my roommate's dog outside my bedroom door. For nearly two years, the duplex has been my home. For almost four years New York has been my home. I belong in the city and mimic the pace and energy of it, but I am stuck in the constant juxtaposition of craving an escape when I’m in the heart of it all, yet yearning for my city life when I am away. Maybe that keeps the city so desirable: the ongoing passion of loving and hating all of it.

For the small portion of this past year that I was home in that East Village duplex, I clung tightly to any sense of routine I could get: cooking for myself, exercising each day, picking up the same coffee order from the cafe around the corner…finding routine is what many seek in home. The less I was home, though, the more uncomfortable it was to be home, let alone maintaining some sort of steady routine. It got to the point where I couldn't even sleep there because I didn’t feel safe, which was irrational considering the decently safe environment that it was. Sure, anyone over 5’7’ could easily jump up and climb the ladder from my fire escape and crawl through the broken window of my bedroom, but the odds are slim. The bustling sounds and all-night chatter of the city that once made me sleep soundly, knowing there were so many people around, made me shudder in fear and caused my imagination to spiral. Something wasn’t syncing for me. Was it because I wasn’t there enough to get into that routine? And perhaps consequently I was constantly thinking about my next move and where else I could seek the comforting version of home I felt I was missing?

Now, half of why I wasn’t home was because of frequent work trips to various American cities, some of which I was curious about and met interesting people, and some of which greatly depressed me as being exactly what I would have expected from non-exceptional American cities. Memphis and New Orleans had culture and spirit, but Denver and Madison were mundane and honestly uglier than people give both of them credit for. The seemingly pristine lakes surrounding Madison aren’t even swimmable. That was all I needed to hear. If anything, it just made me desire New York even more. The rest of my time away from the city, however, is why my idea of home has begun to warp. 

A classic cliche line that’s thrown around, and plastered in cheap paint on little pieces of fake wood for people to decorate their kitchens with, is that “home is not a place, it’s a person”, or something of that nature. I have always seen home as an environment, encompassing the people I love in it. Home was my spooky house in the cozy town of Washington, Ct with my four family members; home was an absurdly yellow and Covent-looking girls’ school; home was my crumbling collegetown house full of six brilliant, partying girls; home was a 4 story walk up in Greenwich Village with my best friend; home was this duplex in the East Village; home was just New York City….Now, I'm frustrated by the idea of home. Is it is a place? a space? a person?  

I spent a lot of this year in Norwalk, CT, an unremarkable town on the shore of Connecticut and about an hour from NYC. The environment for me in Norwalk was in no typical sense a form of home, considering how often I came. I would either sneak late at night into a house whose residents didn’t know I was there and would have been horrified to find out, or sit in a suave but cramped Japanese car with no AC for hours sweating, or sleep on a blow-up mattress in a skeleton of a house amidst renovation. All three environments lacked comfort or routine, except for the frequent trips to Dunkin’ Donuts. I came to Norwalk, I let home become disfigured and jumbled and I let any sense of routine, which I so much valued, all slip away because I fell in love. Mars lives in Norwalk. As much I disliked Norwalk and the discomfort of it physically, the amount of comfort and peace I felt in being with him overpowered anything else. All of a sudden, because of all the moving around and lack of routine, he felt like a new kind of home. But then again, Norwalk was not, nor did I want him to be my definition of home, not yet, not when we lived apart, and he couldn't be. That would then mean that whenever I was back home in New York, I wasn't really home? But then again, when I was in Norwalk, a place I found no routine or connection to, I was home? No. Hence, my frustration! Perhaps the idea is to find different sources of home when I am in each place instead of letting myself get pushed and pulled until I am just purely living in discomfort and fear?

As Toni Morrison said, home is a place where you aren’t constantly thinking about leaving; how wonderfully simple! I have not yet found that place. When I am in New York, I crave the feeling of peace I have with the person I love, as it’s far more addicting than the version of home that revolves around the routine of a morning coffee. Yet when I am with him, I can’t help but be distracted by Norwalk and how much I desire New York and that routine. But did I even have a routine in the city? Maybe I was just as lost in the city, clinging to any sense of pattern I could. It’s a balance of course, but having to balance your homes inevitably creates an imbalance in something that should remain at equilibrium. And home should stay at a kind of equilibrium? Morrison’s words above made me feel so.

Amidst my distress sitting on a blow-up mattress in Norwalk, debating when to take the train back to the city, I felt a kind of emptiness from my deep confusion on this matter of home. My lease is up at the duplex in two months. Then what? Can home be day-to-day? Week to week? Maybe it doesn't have to be so stable and stagnant. Routine is ever moving and changing, seeking routine in home and home in routine can be full of motion. But why do I even have to connect routine and home? The separation of church and state! It scares me too much. 

Why is the narrative that home should be at equilibrium? My conclusion is that I must own that I am in motion, not just physically from place to place, but I am in a transition from my home going from just a place and from a routine to something less tangible. I guess redefining home and what we seek from the idea of it is always going to change and part of growing up is embracing that. Home will never be the place your parents take you back to after they pick you up from school and fix you a snack. You would never consider leaving that place…I guess until you grow up and have to. For now, home can be with Mars, and it can also be New York. And like Morrison also said, home is an imaginative place, so maybe she’s right in that it doesn’t have to be as simple as one space. If I can distinguish home as a place from home as just one space, then perhaps it can become a place I don’t ever think about leaving.