create a world in which I can feel at home

People are home to me like a rosette window on the top floor of an old building. Softly intense expressions and warm, strong arms work as well as an oatmeal sweater and a favorite chair.

I need things I couldn’t name if asked to, but I know them when I feel them. My Dad’s voice, my Mom’s hands, Johnny’s laugh, Lauren’s hair, J’s profile when I look to my left in his car, the prelude to Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 in G Major, the sun warming my hair on a cold day.

Things to remember, simply. Notes to self.

The rosette window, the hardwood, the exposed brick, and those S-hooks, that will never go away. In the meantime, though, I wonder if “home” is terribly etherial or if it’s something a bit more concrete that can be created within the right light or combination of paint colors. Is it a matter of the experiences we have within a place or more chillingly, the ones we don’t?

The yellow cinder blocks of Russell felt like home where this legitimate apartment does not and I’m somewhat confused by that. I know most of my feeling like an outsider here is that well, I am one. I’m living in Emily’s apartment and when I leave, it’ll look scarcely different aside from one empty room and fewer shoes in the coat closet.

How to make a place my own, though? Is it color or structure or texture or temperature? I’m terrified of living alone, you see, and know that soon I will be made to and wonder if a place in which I’m alone could ever feel like home. I’ll update you when I’ve experimented, I suppose.

My dreams of place have shifted somewhat, almost completely without my knowledge. I have dreamed for years of a loft, a huge circular rosette of a window, gleaming hardwood floors, all exposed brick and a totally open floor plan, completely awash in sunlight during the day with low lighting and sparkling accents at night. This would be so easy to accomplish if only I could find the place.

However, in the interim, those dreams of Bostonian grandeur kicked in and I imagined a brownstone. I admit, my dreams of a brownstone were two-fold: 1) walking up to it from the outside with groceries in hand, sitting on the steps and reading, just marvelling at its history; 2) the pumpkin-carving and Christmas tree with Andy that I try not to think about.

Now, though, minus one Andy and with added frustration about not the city, but the people I’ve met, the ones I haven’t, and the opportunities I’ve not discovered…now I realize that the loft is what came from within while the brownstone was what came from without. I need those bricks, that window.

I had lunch with my two favorite people in this city yesterday. We walked to a place I’d never heard of in a part of town I’m totally unfamiliar with. The place was perfect—an old brick building, all exposed inside with an adorable counter and the perfect coffee shop atmosphere. On the walls, they’d attached steel beams, just one on each accessible wall, horizontally at about 6’5”. With S-hooks and thin braided steel wire, they’d attached these intensely beautiful photo collages of events and people around the community. It sounds far too industrial for my tastes, I know, but the warmth of these photos and the perfect amount of white space really made me feel at home. Had the photos been of different sizes or had their colors been more highly saturated or had they been suspended on longer cables or higher on the wall, they may have had a gallery feel, but as it was, it was exactly what I wanted.

Another piece of the puzzle…and it feels really good to have even that tiny glimmer of clarity.

The more I imagine my life as I want it to be, the more I’m confident that I’ll be absolutely able to create the space that will feel just like I need it to feel. The problem is that right now, my world is so, so small and that it’s difficult to see the somewhat lovely reality of the situation when so much of my brain is so worn down.

The true test here is to try to create a world within the one I currently inhabit, will be to be my own self within a world that isn’t precisely mind.

Boston soon, though, please. Yes?

While Lauren and I attempted to get some rest before our (ultimately cancelled) flight to Boston, I kept having fitful dreams about not feeling safe, not feeling comfortable, not feeling at home upon moving there.

The money and the job are still a little out of reach for the next few months, but what I realize consciously (even if my dream-self hasn’t caught on) is that you don’t feel at home until you make a home, right? Color and texture are incredibly important to me, as are neighborhoods and the feel of a place and so long as I can find these things in one place, I will make it home.

...I’ve perhaps picked out a bedroom paint color? Maybe I’m a little absurd, but I’m really bloody determined.

Working out the details, yos. We’ll get there.

I have a better idea of what this world would be now than I ever have and all I have to do is finance it and just let it happen. Every night, I go to bed to images of what this world would look like and what I’d look like living in it. Colors and textures and sounds pervade and it produces this uncanny ache at the same time it absolutely relaxes me.

We’ll get there, we will.

In my head, I imagine the perfect place—the streets, the colors, the people, the magazine stand or the bookstore on the corner, the perfect place to get my morning coffee and the perfect cafe for lunch and the perfect places to take people to dinner (friends or family or whomever).

For the first time in my life, I have legitimate plans and for the first time in either of ours, Lauren’s have matched up with mine and there is no bloody way I’m letting something as simple as money stand in the way of this kind of necessary fruition. We have the important parts of this down and yet I still find the others dreadfully frustrating.

I loved my home in Marietta and I love the home in which I grew up and even Pittsburgh’s starting to feel like a temporary home, but I know it’s not where I belong and I am entirely committed to establishing my own small world wherein I can feel completely myself. Marietta was that for a small while and home in CF-town will always always be home to me, but even though I still get along splendidly here, I need to strike out on my own and for myself. I used to think apartment life was romantic and exciting, but I’d love to live in a small house with my best friends in a classic kind of place, comfortable, stable, and independent.