Mutability of homes

I wrote a song about a year ago about surviving depression, and one of the hard things I listed in the lyrics was the “mutability of homes.” I said that because since the age of 19 I’ve been building little makeshift homes for myself and watching them disappear as friends move or marry or graduate, and I am left to move and rebuild, move and rebuild, move and rebuild. 

Moon apartments felt like home. It was small and grungy, and we didn’t do a thing to decorate it, but I loved it there. I loved it because of the people. Nat, my roommate, woke me up at 6 every day to work out, and took me to dances and dinners and service activities every night, and never let me be still for long enough to be anxious. I’d never, ever had that before, and I sometimes cried at night out of happiness instead of sadness- I couldn’t believe I felt happy more than sad, because I hadn't experienced that in years. But then, you know, we all moved. Shuffled into new apartments, none of us together. 

The condo was my home for a while- my three best friends, crazy filmmaker boys who loved me in a completely and beautifully platonic way, lived there officially, and I did unofficially. We filmed sketches and wrote music and watched movies and talked about the future and how we were going to change the world of entertainment. I was 22. I’d been happy at Moon, but I’d never felt this productive, this myself, this filled with purpose, and most of all, this understood. The boys weren’t driven by the desire for perfect grades, or to impress anyone, or to get married, the way everyone else seemed to be- they just wanted to create wonderful things and make people laugh and make people FEEL things, which is all I ever wanted to do as well. 

They sold the condo, a little over a year after I met them. Peter and Cameron got married, ironically enough, and Jeff moved to Salt Lake. And I was left living in a town house with my friend Chelsea, feeling lost and abandoned and scared of the future. Scared because I wondered if I’d ever find people with such similar goals and dreams and desires, who would want me around as much as the boys had. I felt purposeless and once again so different from everyone around me.

But that summer Chelsea Martin made the little townhouse a home. She took better care of me than anyone has ever taken care of me, other than my mom and dad. She made beautiful creative dinners for the two of us every night, we played card games and went to parks and talked about everything and nothing and sometimes, when one of us felt a bit sad, we moved our two couches together to make “megacouch”, where we’d cuddle in blankets and watch shows on her laptop until we fell asleep. Some mornings we made peach cobblers out of fresh peaches from her grandmas yard. Some nights we’d hear about things going on down town and just wordlessly jump up and go without any discussion at all about it, as if we could read each others minds. When I felt so lonely and sad and purposeless that I needed to just cry, she held me or took me hand and just listened, and told me it was alright to feel the way I did. It was exactly, perfectly, what I needed. Anything else would have been too much or not enough. But, of course, for whatever reason, we ended up in different places when Fall came. We’d signed contracts for our fall housing back in January, and it was too late to change things, even though both of us were incredibly sad to not to live together anymore. We cried when we left our townhouse for the last time. 

But I wasn’t going into my new home blind- I moved in with three of my best friends. Today I live in a little blue house that was built in 1908, with Andrielle, Kacee, Madeline, and two other awesome girls named Hailey and Finn who I hadn’t known before. They aren’t as crazy and adventurous as the boys, and they aren’t as perfectly angelic and motherly as Chelsea, but they are just exactly what I need now. We take care of each other, we spend late nights in the kitchen laughing and telling each other stories, we host family dinners, we wake up early to hike, we blast Queen music in the living room and dance on the couches. We are a family and I truly, deeply love each of them. Andrielle, a beautiful and strong-willed ballerina who loves discussing filmmaking and writing and Greek mythology and all sorts of weird wonderful things with me. Kacee, who fought tooth and nail to get out of her tiny town in Idaho that no one ever left, to get an education and become a doctor, and who fights so many battles every day, and who is one of the only people in the world who I can tell absolutely anything to without any fear of judgement. Mads, patient and calm and grounded, who tells me whenever I’m anxious or sad that it’s fine, I don’t have to be okay all the time, in a way that makes me believe it.

Homes. Homes are people. Each place is not a place but the people who inhabited it, and I get so attached to people, and they keep changing and leaving and homes keep crumbling and I keep rebuilding, and it all hurts, all the time. The weight of all those past lives all push on me sometimes, and I miss people and the way things were more than I can put into words. There are no words for exactly what it was like in each of those places- I can’t transport you there in all it’s detail and complexity, and the way it felt to me, and the way it sits in my mind. 

Home. And before all the homes I built, came the home I was raised in, the home I was given. And that too pushes on my mind; the trees, the ocean, my mother and father, the way it feels to be in my childhood home. The landscape, a million shades of emerald and watery grey and deep brown and gold and comfort. To me it is still comfort. Grounding. Like a steady heartbeat hundreds of miles away.