Author’s Note: Happy Gemini season! I will be turning twenty-seven on the 28th of May. This makes me a Gemini Sun, Aquarius Moon, and Cancer Rising. This birthday will be a quiet one, but the big thirty is well on its way.
“It’s hard, saying a story without a critical part.” —In the Dream House, Carmen Maria Machado
Before Christmas of 2017, I had only moved house once. I was three years old when we first moved back in 2000, so I don’t remember very much. However, we left my childhood home in 2017 in a peculiar way. The house we were moving to wasn’t finished yet, but I had very little say in having to leave the sanctuary I had known for most of my life. On the eve of the 15th of December, we all packed one suitcase and drove out of the close, never to return.
Months later, I went to collect some of my things. The house was very much frozen in time. My childhood bedroom left rotting in its own stardust. All my books, DVDs, trinkets, teddy bears, perfume, and speakers had been orphaned. The memories I held played on a projector screen in my head. I saw my cat wandering the halls, my Dad playing guitar in his computer room, and my mum feather dusting the sofa as she watched QVC.
Eight months later, my parents would divorce. As one parent left the home, the house that I never really loved became a graveyard. We wouldn’t move (yet again with no say) until April of 2020 to a stranger’s house who had bought our old one. Then the pandemic came and I met Stewart. The third house was a unique point in time. The whole world was shut down, dying, and sick: yet I had a man to finally tell me he loved me. We spoke every single day for the nine months he was alive. By the time we left the third house, he had been deceased for just under two years. I have always believed his ghost resides in the wallpaper there
The fourth house (the current one) is a quiet little semi-detached in a street out of the way. While I won’t be leaving any time soon, I still feel as though I have lost pieces of myself in the houses that came before. Most of all, I long for my childhood bedroom. I long for its pink wallpaper, grey carpets, decent speaker set up, circular window, and attic walls. I yearn for the milk stain in the carpet. Other people live there now, having stripped our ghosts from the ceilings. I checked the listing online out of curiosity. The only remaining feature was the cat flap we had installed (that was never used because Millie refused).
A home is incredibly personal. Each one has its own scent. I know this because when I was younger, I would knock on my friend’s house, and a cloud of cooking hit my nostrils. At Christmas time, our neighbour completely covered the front of his house in Christmas lights. As the top of our street was a hill, you could see them in all their glory as we drove down. The first house is the only place I have felt true. I would come home from school and feel at peace. I’d open the windows and play Lana Del Rey as loud as I could.
Your bedroom is like a second soul. Everything is catered to who you are. You put up posters of your favourite musicians, cuts of your favourite poems, photographs you like, and paintings you like. The stains on your carpets are yours and yours alone. That chip in the wall is your chip and yours alone. Every perceived flaw is personal to those who exist within them. This may seem like a no-brainer, but many of us don’t give much thought to the space we occupy. I would argue there is an economical factor here: those on the bread line can only care for a roof over their heads, whereas the more fortunate spend hours in IKEA picking out a lamp that looks like an egg.
So, what did I leave at my childhood home? In that space, I had a strong sense of identity. I knew exactly who I was and who I wanted to be. Imagine your house as a womb and your bedroom as the amniotic sac. They act as breeding grounds for growth. Now let’s imagine the menstrual cycle as a bloodletting. Each month, we lose our old blood and unbred ideas.
Sticking with this theory, by moving house, we create an even bigger system of bloodletting. Each womb we retreat to shapes us in subconscious ways. These changes can only be perceived through hindsight. I only discovered this loss a few years after leaving my childhood home.
I tend to think of the parts we lost as spirits in canopic jars: completely preserved in a different time, no matter the season. Perhaps when we die, our spirit returns to old wombs to collect them, taking them to our very own Elysium where the clouds are made of maple cream and the moon a sugar ball.
Courtenay's Corner 