Where are you from? People ask.
I don’t know where I’m from; I don’t know how to answer the question.
Well, where is home? They follow up after I meet them with a blank expression.
Dallas, Austin, Denver, Nashville, I stutter. I have lived in thirty-two different places but don’t know where home is.
When people ask where I’m from, this is what I want to tell them.
My houses have spanned eight states, one territory, and three countries. As a child, I moved for my dad’s job. As an adult I moved out of avoidance or longing, depending on how you look at it.
Some of the houses have been brick, other wood or stucco. Some of the houses haven’t actually been houses but condos or apartments. Some of the houses have been surrounded by Dogwoods, others by Oaks, a few with no trees but a view of concrete buildings, one with a view of the Nile. I haven’t lived in any house longer than four years.
I’ve revisited some, but they no longer feel like home, only giant boxes with trapped memories. And even then, how many of those memories are tied to my parents sitting me down to say my dad’s job would have us changing locations again?
Okay, but where were you born?
I was born in Georgia, I come from two parents, but the true answer isn’t linked to the location. The truest answer is I was born from a love that once exsisted.My parents’ love started in Texas, where they met in 1986. It then took them to Atlanta, where I was born. As a family of three, my dad’s job in the automotive industry took us to Oregon, Connecticut, Texas, California, and eventually back to Texas. I lived there the longest, a total of fourteen years, time split between Dallas/ Ft. Worth and Austin.
For the fourteen years in Texas, many of those years felt like home. My parents promised me wherever I started high school was where I would finish. They didn’t keep every promise, but that was one they kept. In college, I transitioned from a 7,500-square-foot house, which my parents sold right after graduation, to a shared dorm room smaller than any of my childhood bedrooms. I shared a bathroom with thirty other girls. Despite lining my wall with photographs and bringing my favorite pillow and the stuffed monkey I slept with every night, it did not feel like home. For the first time, I wondered what home meant. I didn’t have my two pillars, my safety net, I knew no one. I had no one. Eventually, that changed, but it still didn’t feel like home without my parents, my dogs.
Where was your favorite place?
The first two houses I lived in, where I was too young to remember anything, mean nothing more to me than the faded photographs that now live in a box in the basement. The house on the cul-de-sac that I lived in during elementary school, my happiest memories which mostly consist of playing four square out front or Marco Polo in the pool out back. The house from middle school didn’t have the memories of the others because I didn’t form the friendships I had in other places. California, Nicole! We can live by the beach and go to Disneyland on weekends. That was one of the first lies they ever told me. Our house in California was over an hour from the beach. The only natural element the house saw was the forest fires that surrounded it. Twice. Though never burning it, just singeing the property in which our house overlooked, leaving the air smelling burnt for weeks. The house from high school in the suburbs of Ft. Worth—flooded with the unpleasant memories of my teenage years—no longer stands. This one actually burnt to ash and dust, two years ago, long after we left for our next destination. How it burnt is an unsolved mystery, I wonder if someone else felt imprisoned by the memories the house held. In its place, a new, bigger house stands, a place for someone to make new memories to call their own. My memories are now released, nothing keeping them trapped in the walls that observed the men who took advantage of my eagerness, my curiosity about life. Or the nights my mom often drank too much and blamed me. Houses don’t mean homes.
Wasn’t it hard, moving so often?
When you do something so often, you get good at it. There’s a difference between being good at something and enjoying it. But the two started to blend together with each moving truck. Moves are hard, but they eventually became a routine. I found moving to be easier than facing problems head on. Possessions and emotions stuffed into boxes, stuffed into a truck.
The walls of my houses have been a rainbow of colors, but I’ve learned the paint color doesn’t matter. Nor do the paintings on the wall or the floor-to-ceiling windows or the cozy rugs that keep voices from echoing, furniture from scratching. New house, new personality. New friends, new lovers. When I was a kid, I had a new nightlight at each house, guiding my way to the bathroom. As an adult, I owned seven couches—two from West Elm, two from Ikea, one from Restoration Hardware, one from Ashley, and one from Pier One.
Growing up, I figured home was with my parents because they were the ones I loved the most. But I could not rediscover those roots once I left “home” and searched for adult origin in Morocco, Vermont, Egypt, California, Colorado, Washington D.C., and finally Tennessee. Each place taught me something—about myself, about the world—but all of them left me longing for the love I once was surrounded by.
…So, home is where the heart is?
I have lived in thirty-two different places, but it wasn’t until Nashville that I found my home.
And then there is him, the man who I have only been with for two months, who I lay next to at night, whose body wraps around mine. The design finishes that make my house a home are the men’s Solomons waiting by the door, the pot with burnt oil crusted at the bottom. My favorite accent wall is the one that was scratched when the two of us moved furniture—a bed, a nightstand, a dresser. I’d Marie Kondo the shit out of anything if it means empty drawers for him to put his clothes in. It’s the warm feeling I get in the pit of my stomach, not from the stew we made but from knowing we made it together. I could live anywhere with him, and it would feel like home.
No, I tell them. Home is wherever I’m with him.
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