Impersonal Houses

1. Identity Crisis

Just weeks after I left for college, my parents moved out of the home I grew up in—the home they raised two children in. They left our quiet little street in Seattle, where I learned to walk, skinned my knees, rode my bike up and down the sidewalks…

They moved to a cul de sac in Everett, where every house is grey and every driveway obscured with children’s toys. The streets wind in senseless but aesthetically pleasing ways, joining 82^nd Avenue with 82^nd Street and 82^nd Drive, or something equally confusing. All the streets have the same perfect hedges, the same glowing doorbells at night. I’ve been there dozens of times and still don’t know the way because every house looks like my parents’ house. There are no homes there. I know it’s a tired cliché, but I can never go home again.

2. Substitutes

I once had an approximate home in the Brick:House, a concert venue on Golden Gardens Beach in Seattle. I volunteered there for a few amazing years of my teenage life. It was ancient and scuffed up; we filled it with flea ridden couches and duct tape signs, ate bags of chips and drank hot apple cider. We met bands and formed bands ourselves and went running through the waves in between sets. Then the parks department remodeled it so that people could hold ugly wedding receptions in an ugly concrete room on an ugly grey beach—Seattle’s approximation of a beach. When we re-opened for concerts almost no one came back. My homes away from home after that were wherever I was with whoever my boyfriend was at the time: a traveling source of comfort, familiarity, and love. An approximate husband for my approximate home.

3. Housemates, Never Homemates

There were the hipster girls, fresh out of high school, who did nothing but smoke pot, listen to music, and draw all over everything. I wasn’t at the house much when I lived with them, which wasn’t long at all. When my grades came in the mail they opened the letter, drew on it, and said I couldn’t have it back.

Next was the guy who liked to seem easy-going with his video games and bong, but was really uptight about keeping the kitchen spotless and not having too many people over. When his girlfriend visited and they had sex, my boyfriend and I had to stuff a towel in our air vent (which ran directly from his bedroom to ours) because her must-be-faking-it screams of ecstasy drowned out all conversation. I shifted around uncomfortably, coughing as she got ever louder.

There were the (ex?)drug addicts who still owe me hundreds of dollars in utilities. They thought their marriage was so fucking special even though their room smelled like cat and ferret piss and they fought all the time, their screams rising through the floor boards and he beat her and she cheated on him.

4. Windows

The view from a window is an extension of the house, or home. You don’t own what you see, but you own the precise way you see it. A good friend of mine—Lily, it was you—had a bay window in her dad’s apartment, on something like the thirty-second floor of a building in downtown Seattle. When I sat in that bay window, there was nothing below me except about thirty other bay windows and the city sidewalk 300 feet down. The wind rattled against the glass as if to warn me not to be foolish enough to sit there, dangling thirty-two stories up. Inside, though, with the dusty pink curtains, it was like being on the ground floor of an old home. I could imagine looking out over a lawn, wildflowers sprawling over rocks and tree roots. I don’t really remember the real view—I was nine or so—but I think it might’ve been Puget Sound.

5. Homemaking

There should be a point of clarification between homeless and houseless. There are millions of people who don’t feel at home in the space they occupy, as they wander around their impersonal houses.

I can go for months at a time without a home. I always have a dwelling, a place to sleep or do homework—which is in itself an impossible task if one doesn’t have a home to work in, as it then becomes housework. (I don’t know what that makes chores then, if homework is housework. Maybe that explains why my sink is always full of dirty dishes.) It’s just that I often don’t feel at home in my residence, for one reason or another. I have to pay rent; I don’t own the house. It’s too cluttered in this small space; I can’t breathe. I know homelessness this way.

I’ve outgrown everything that clothed the walls of my old bedroom; I am not that person anymore, but I haven’t grown into someone else. I feel stuck in a transition between homes, a move that is taking far too long. My surroundings don’t look like home to me. They could be anyone’s house. I don’t have the money or, more importantly it seems, the willpower to change the aesthetics of the place I live. Aside from ownership, aside from the quantity of possessions filling the house, what must make it a home for me in the end is visual. I can’t think what poster, what perfect knickknack, what witty doormat would turn my house into my home. I get anxious about it and give up on the whole idea. There is always an excuse to keep myself suspended in this discomfort.