by Jacqueline Goldblatt
The day of the move, I was preparing to turn in a research paper on sympathetic villains that I had been working on for the entire semester. Typically, I would have been happy, proud even, of my efforts. To see months and months of hard work finally come to fruition…nothing could beat that sense of accomplishment. But at that moment, I was feeling more like one of the villains from my thesis instead of a triumphant hero.
While I had been tip-tapping away on my keyboard and fully immersing myself in the world of academia, my parents had been drowning in boxes and struggling to navigate the choppy waters of suburban real estate. I’d helped as much as I could when I came home on the weekends. At least, I tried to. It never felt like enough. And now, to add to my shame, I couldn’t even be there to help on the big day. Mom and Dad didn’t blame me or anything, they’d made it rather clear that my academics came first. Still, the sense of helplessness that surrounded me made me sick. The feeling of being uprooted, of trading in one home for another without being able to say goodbye, made things even worse.
Hearing about the success of the move made the negative emotions fade relatively quickly. The sensation of displacement, however, increased that weekend when I stepped through the door of our new apartment. The furniture was familiar enough; the black canvas with its colorfully painted shapes, the rickety dining room chair, but that was where the similarities ended. The walls, once a rosy blush shade, were now cream. An electric stove had replaced the gas one where Mom and I used to cook French toast and scrambled eggs. Dad’s bookshelf, forever a fixture of the basement, now stood imperiously over the couch in the living room. It was as if someone had taken the puzzle pieces of my life and somehow connected the wrong bits together. I could pick out glimpses of what once was, but they were blurred somehow, a photograph that was out of focus.
A home is not just a structure. No, it’s a space steeped in memory, engraved with invisible impressions of the past. The previous owners of the home could easily spot these hidden treasures. They were the ones who buried them in the first place. I, on the other hand, have no such map to guide me, nor are there any impactful memories squirreled away within the apartment’s square feet. My parents do, though. They moved here, physically carrying parcels and packages that contained my childhood and their 25 years together. They have plenty of stories to tell of what a struggle it was during, and the happy exhaustion afterward. I, however, simply moved here. I took a step over the threshold and arrived at a place where I could rest my head at night. A place that, in order for me to truly call home, must be inhabited more often than the weekends I’m able to slip away from the dorm. Right now, that place is not home. Come summer, it will be.