I am obsessed with the idea of coming home. Or I guess more on the idea of these places being seen as more than an inanimate space. These places or things take on the personality and reflect their previous inhabitants.
Maybe it is because I haven’t really felt like I have had a home in years, just a residence to return too.
Years ago, after an extremely rough period in my life, I came to the realization that the concept of home does not have to include a structure or imply completely happiness.
My home was a person. An ex-boyfriend and (perhaps) the love of my life, if I believed in anything like that. When he left, that was gone. And even now, over a decade later I am still sometimes feeling like I am fumbling around in a blacked-out room with nothing but a sense of touch to make my way around.
Or perhaps it is more to do with the idea that even when we leave a place or realm etc, we can still leave an imprint even after our presence is gone.
“ Houses... are alive. This is something we know. News from our nerve endings. If we're quiet, if we listen, we can hear houses breathe. Sometimes, in the depth of the night, you can even hear them groan”
“ It never occurred to them that, sure, maybe they never really had a roof and four walls but they were never, in fact, homeless.”
“ I could live there all alone, she thought, slowing the car to look down the winding garden path to the small blue front door with, perfectly, a white cat on the step. No one would ever find me there, either, behind all those roses, and just to make sure I would plant oleanders by the road. I will light a fire in the cool evenings and toast apples at my own hearth. I will raise white cats and sew white curtains for the windows and sometimes come out of my door to go to the store to buy cinnamon and tea and thread. People will come to me to have their fortunes told, and I will brew love potions for sad maidens; I will have a robin...”
