#60 Home turf

It’s difficult to write about because I think, in some ways, there are still parts of me that feel like they are in April 2024. A year ago! And somehow not so long ago, but somehow also another life ago. Ironically, the live laugh love bitches were right. The once you hit rock bottom you have no way to go but up bitches were also right. I remember flying back home on March 30th to welcome April across the world, accepting that I’d done everything humanly possible to not have to come home. I wouldn’t necessarily say it was a failure that I was feeling but more like a deep sense of nothingness and boredom, an undercurrent of sadness that had weaved its way into my life and bled into every facet of it by the time I got on that flight. I remember settling into the airport seat after calling a friend, telling her about someone I met, excited for what it could all mean.

I remember getting home and settling into a routine again, building an altar, asking my dad about his mother and his grandmothers and The Divorce, suddenly curious to dig up memories from an old dusty box, forgotten in the basement. This is what led me to asking these questions — I found piles and piles of photo albums stored in a cupboard under the stairs — I leafed through them and stared and stared at the faces in sepia tones, looking back at me, open and unaware of the world to come. The life that would happen. The things they would lose.

I came home around a year after my cousin’s passing, and I talk about the grief and the mundanity of it with my aunt in a crowded cafe one Tuesday afternoon, the heat that day blistering. She is unmovable as she tells me that it’s something she is continuing to get used to. She talks about grief like it’s her new live-in permanent roommate, an annex in the house that is her heart.

She tells me about my younger cousin, how she finds him holding an old t-shirt, crying in the laundry room. What if everyone forgets him, he asks her. She comforts him. When we love someone, we can never forget them. I remember we ate ham and cheese sandwiches and sipped on black coffee and let the silence sit between us. With my aunt, loss is never awkward or strange. It is mundane because it is. Her daily life is inundated with it.

I kept these photos by the window of my shared living room: of her as a teenager with a cigarette in hand in my grandmother's home, an uncle who I never met smiling into the camera, mid-laugh, my grandmother, all awash in tones of beige and maroon. To commit things to memory is a form of making a home. I hang them up across the world again this June, and slowly things start falling into place again. I moved houses in August, and the summer heat is blazing, and people are everywhere, arms and legs and skin! So much skin! and I fall in love.

I have been reading again, and waking up every morning has been easier. Moving houses proved to be the best decision I have made in years, and my name is on a contract for the first time since I moved back to Amsterdam in 2022. Stability eluded me until it found me again, and I settled into a feeling of permanence without even noticing it.

Getting older surprises me because I was always keenly aware of how temporary everything was: moving houses 9 times across as many years, changing jobs, changing projects, traveling back and forth between cities and friends, my mom moves countries, my visits to Venezuela get longer. It is the familiar rhythm of a life that’s uprooted, like millions of people who decide to leave home.

Getting older surprises me now because I wake up wanting a sense of permanence and repetition, months into a new structure and routine. I feel safe, and the predictability of it gives me a sense of control and consistency. It hasn’t been this way in years! And I think, this! I want more of this. I want to know my days better and enjoy the sunlight on my face and have a rhythm to my time that is comforting and grounding. For the first time in a long time, my desires change radically, and I radically change with them.

What does that mean to me? I’ve written about wanting what I want before. Getting older is also silencing that embarrassment about wanting what I want. My kneejerk reaction is to stifle the desire down into the pit of my stomach and tell myself the only path to a sense of stability is in living alone or buying a house, which are not currently possible. Of course, very me to make a desire absolutely unreachable unless it is met with certain conditions. I decide instead I can just choose to say what I want and let life handle it. RADICAL!!!!! LOL

Getting something you once wanted comes so sneakily and quietly sometimes. Most times, really. It will come through something mundane and unceremonious, like an email. After a period that felt weird or uncomfortable, the sudden comfort of getting what you want isn’t as jarring at first but more like a rebound effect. Months down the line, I’m upset about a project ending sooner than expected and a change in my roommates’ plans, and then I notice: remember when you didn’t have any of these things you once wanted? When you were hoping for some kind of certainty, living in an ocean of endless maybes and not right nows and who knows when? and the answer was just to take things one day at a time, and it felt like it was going to kill you? Guess what, you survived.

I think it’s hard to write about it because it exposes my many neuroses and compulsions to try to arrive at a point of 100% certainty rate. I want predictability to feel safe. I want something like a job or a rental contract to always remain the same. These are not things to feel ashamed of wanting! What you want isn’t wrong or unnatural or impossible to ask for. Maybe I’m not as nimble and adaptable as I was when I was twenty, and I haven’t lost anything by it; maybe I’ve just gained something new.

When I went home last April, I felt a newfound fondness for the ability to get there in the first place. My mom cannot leave her new home until her papers are sorted, and we know how immigration works. (To say, we never know). Wars are raging on, and we know how quickly buildings crumble and situations escalate and detonate everything around them, and everything becomes rubble.

And maybe getting older for me means wanting to lie down with a taste of permanence in my mouth and telling myself I’ve been tasting as many apples as I could.

“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and being alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You have to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes too near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could.”

Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum