One day I will own a historic home.
I can't get over how gorgeous historic buildings are. I could spend so much time photographing them. The incredible details are so striking. Old buildings have something that just doesn't exist in new buildings: history. They tell stories. They somehow hold parts of each person involved in building and inhabiting them. They are a physical manifestation of countless memories. I almost feel like they are alive sometimes.
One of the perks of living out east is that history is much more present than it is out west. It's just a logical consequence of the way in which Canada was settled. I told Lycidas, my dear history-loving friend, that the east is steeped in history, and that you can't help but find it, even if you aren't looking for it. There is a connectedness with history that is tangible when you are out here that just doesn't exist in Alberta.
It might be an actual house, it might be an apartment in a historic building, but one day I will own a historic home.
You know that point in your life when you realize the house you grew up in isn't really your home anymore? All of a sudden, even though you have someplace where you put your shit, that idea of home is gone...You'll see one day when you move out. It just sort of happens one day and it's gone. You feel like you can never get it back. It's like you feel homesick for a place that doesn't even exist. Maybe it's like this right of passage, you know? You won't ever have this feeling again until you create a new idea of home for yourself. You know, for your kids, for the family you start. It's like a cycle or something. I don't know, but I miss the idea of it, you know? (Garden State)
Home is a concept that has been on my mind a lot lately. When you're in your 20s, home is a puzzling concept. It's particularly bad if you move into dorms, I think. Your parents' house kind of stops feeling like home. Oh, you still call it home. And in some ways, I guess it always will be home, but now there's this other place, this place that you live eight months of the year, that feels more like home. At least, it does if you're like me and you're lucky enough to live with people who you genuinely feel at home with. And then summer comes and you move back "home." But you can't help but feel like you are moving away from home at the same time. It's confusing. You wind up with two separate worlds, a foot in each one. It only gets worse when you graduate. You've spent four years in this limbo, but you've also been carefully constructing a home for yourself. I know I did. And it had more to do with the people than the place, but I think that spaces hold significance, so the place probably had a role to play as well. The people are the really important part though. I just went to a wedding of some dear friends this weekend and sitting at a table amongst people I had spent years in school with, living with some of them, I felt profoundly at home. So, now that I'm moving across the country, and we are all scattering like shards from a dropped glass, where is home? What is home? I've loved this quote from Garden State for a long time because it just seems to capture this homeless kind of feeling so well.
Phantom Limbs
Anne Michaels
"The face of the city changes more quickly, alas! than the mortal
heart."
- CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
So much of the city
is our bodies. Places in us
old light still slants through to.
Places that no longer exist but are full of feeling,
like phantom limbs.
Even the city carries ruins in its heart.
Longs to be touched in places
only it remembers.
Through the yellow hooves
of the ginkgo, parchment light;
in that apartment where I first
touched your shoulders under your sweater,
that October afternoon you left keys
in the fridge, milk on the table.
The yard - our moonlight motel -
where we slept summer's hottest nights,
on grass so cold it felt wet.
Behind us, freight trains crossed the city,
a steel banner, a noisy wall.
Now the hollow diad
floats behind glass
in office towers also haunted
by our voices.
Few buildings, few lives
are built so well
even their ruins are beautiful.
But we loved the abandoned distillery:
stone floors cracking under empty vats,
wooden floors half rotted into dirt,
stairs leading nowhere, high rooms
run through with swords of dusty light.
A place the rain still loved, its silver paint
on rusted things that had stopped moving it seemed, for us.
Closed rooms open only to weather,
pungent with soot and molasses,
scent-stung. A place
where everything too big to take apart
had been left behind.
I'm moving across the country in three weeks. This is both exciting and terrifying. I'm excited because I'm headed to a province I dearly love and find exceptionally beautiful. I'm terrified because I am moving somewhere that I know no one and am leaving behind the people who are dearest to me in the world.
It's funny how places retain the people who inhabit them. How a location can bring back a flood of memories. How going somewhere can make you remember someone who is long gone or who you haven't thought about in a long time. We leave impressions on places it seems; sometimes they are visible and sometimes they are invisible. We literally leave our mark on places with buildings and possessions, the kinds of things that archeologist uncover, but we leave a less tangible mark on a place. And a place leaves a mark on us. It's such a strange thing to ponder, but it's something I think about often, and all the more often as I wrench myself out of the place I grew up in.
This whole apartment thing is a nightmare. Every place that I can afford comes with a roommate who is a freak. I mean, look at this, "Wanted: female roommate, non-smoker, non-ugly." Just, there's nothing. This city is full. -- Rachel Greene, Friends, "The One With Ross's Denial"
For those of you who don't know, I'm supposed to be moving across the country in about 5 weeks. I still haven't found an apartment. My hunt hasn't been quite as sitcom-y, but substitute dumpy places for freaky roommates and you have a pretty good summary of my last good chunk of time. I am beginning to feel like I'm on the edge of a nervous breakdown. Apartment hunting is consuming every free moment of my thoughts, and even some moments that aren't supposed to be free. It's hard to focus on anything else. I thought I hated moving - the packing and unpacking has never been something I've enjoyed - but I've discovered I hate apartment hunting even more. This whole apartment thing is a nightmare indeed.
