spaces that shape us

living and memory

When returning from time away, coming back to what real life normally looks like, there are always the open-ended questions. What happened during your absence? And how can one really respond accurately? I went home.

It was only a few weeks away. I look at the calendar to try to count how many, but the figures all seem wrong. Without the schedule and routine of work, without the desire to do much of anything, the days extended into infinity, evenings compressed into nothingness, vice versa. A freedom from effort turned into a freedom from the clock.

At home, we look back as we always do, the rotating photos on the new digital picture frame displaying our vacations to London and Vienna and Berlin and New York. There are the memories of the food we ate and the fights we had and the time we asked the hotel for towels multiple times and ended up with enough towels to dry the English Channel. We’ve lived our whole lives together; there’s so much to look back on.

I talk with my mother about the home that I grew up in, the one by the park. I miss that house — the office area where my brother and I would spend hours in front of the desktop computer, the room where we played endless hours of video games, the breakfast table where I did homework for over a decade. She says that felt like she found her independence and sense of self in that house. It was the first place that felt fully hers, one that she could grow into and make her own. She turned the house into our home, the place where I became a person and experienced every emotion under the sun.

Now, I sit in an apartment in San Francisco that I’ve lived in for four and a half years. In this four-bedroom apartment, my brother and I have lived with four different people over the years, in different arrangements of furniture and friends and lifestyles. We moved in the midst of COVID lockdowns, attempting to order furniture and make the place livable when everything was still closed. Over time, we gathered more furniture, entered routines that would last for a while, until someone moved out and someone else moved in.

This is an apartment where I’ve grown into myself — one where I have repeatedly fallen in love, repeatedly broken my heart, repeatedly put myself back together again, and continued to change every day. It’s seen many different versions of me: the progressions of a man learning to become comfortable with being a man, the backslides into childhood that accompany that journey. I’ve celebrated several birthdays here, grown closer to my brother, to my friends. We played so many hands of poker, watched dozens of football and basketball games, grinded out thousands of sets with our gym equipment in the living room. Conversations that altered me bounced around these walls.

In a few weeks, I will leave here for the last time. I will look back in memory to this beautiful apartment in this beautiful city, a formative space that encapsulates everything I love about the city in the fog. Isn’t it incredible that I was able to walk to three different parks? The sun would shine through the bay window. The hummingbirds would frequent the tree right outside the glass.

My parents moved into another house ten years ago. It’s a nice place, a respite from my worst days in college, a new home. Even with its comfort and familiarity, a part of me can never forget the home I loved so dearly. And when I move into a new apartment in a few months, I will feel the same.

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We must do what we can to push back against the genocide in Gaza and the invasion of Lebanon. Consider calling your US representatives to support de-escalation and a ceasefire, donating to Care for Gaza (grassroots organizations delivering food to Palestinians), directly to families or by buying e-SIMs to keep folks connected to their families. Lebanon is suffering too— consider donating to the Lebanese Food Bank, The Zahra Trust, or Beit El Baraka to help provide relief and resources.

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💧 Drops of the Week 💧

• PLAYLIST - House Music Nerds - easy listening house music

• POEM - “Today, the Begonias” by Sam Herschel Wein - It is not impossible to find flowers that smell / like the laundry detergent / you grew up with.