i’ve moved a lot. an awful lot. i won’t say i ever got used to saying goodbye. i remember being 7 or 8 and crying when our fridge died. instead of the normal attachments kids have to their home, their childhood, mine were misplaced. misplaced in ways that would baffle some, but made perfect sense to me. that refridgerator had been with me longer than my current bedroom. longer than my new best friend a few doors down. longer than the view from my livingroom window. it was a piece of the everyday in a constantly new world.
my mum always taught me that a home was not four walls, it was the people around you.
in my adulthood.. if i am to call myself an adult.. i hadn’t found my balance yet. when i was 20 i decided it was time to move out. i still can’t fully account for the reason. part of it was definitely my mum’s new marriage. a new marriage and a new home with her husband, in which it was obvious, if only to me, that i was just a guest. it may have been my growing realization that my relationship with my mum was only strained the closer we lived. and it may have been, having lived in my current room for almost a year, that i was becoming increasingly detached from a place i had never really settled.
whatever the reason, i moved out at 20 and have been moving ever since.
one night in amsterdam, after a very short, heartbreaking trip home to canada, i was climbing the stairs to my current room. i was tired. slightly disoriented from the whirlwind of life changes that had occured in less than a week. i was half way up the stairs when i took a deep breath in. i stopped dead on the stairs. the smell that hit me, for the first time since i had moved into that town house in an amsterdam suburb, snapped me into focus. the smell was the laundry soap from the laundry room next door to my bedroom, cool evening air floating in from the always open window in the bathroom, and that indescribable, mingled scent of four, completely different souls, squished into 40 square feet. in that half a moment when the scent first hit me, i realized how comfortable i had become in such a short time. i realized that honestly, for the first time, i was somewhere that i wasn’t waiting to leave. i knew i loved the city. i knew i loved my friends. but this was the first time in my life i knew what it was to have a place that felt like a home. a strange, gypsy version of a home.
