There are a lot of different ways and measures we can use to separate periods of our lives from one another. The obvious one is by year. However, while I am not atypical in the fact that I also count by years, I also tend to separate these different periods based on where I was living at the time. Each house, apartment, and dorm I’ve lived in has housed a different version of me.
I have no real memories of the first house I lived in. A majority of what I know about this time is from old photos stored away in a box on top of a shelf in my moms closet. This sounds like I don’t look at them often, which is true, but looking at them constantly becomes unnecessary when I can envision them so well in my head. There’s one photo in particular that always comes to mind before the others: it’s a family photo, before my brother was born so incomplete at the time, but our family nonetheless. I’m maybe two-years-old and wearing a pink onesie with white sandals and my hair, admittedly, is not the best style I’ve ever had. I’m being held by my mom, who is still in her work scrubs adorned with hearts and kittens, a style she would never dare to wear today. She looks young, and this always makes me want to cry. She looks beautiful too.
Next to us, is my dad and my sister. My sister is around the age of 4, but our birthdays fall in a way that for a short period of the year she’s only 1 year older than me, so she might be 3; our family was never great at putting dates on the back of printed photos. While my sister is being held by my dad, she still has an arm wrapped around me. She’s wearing a red t-shirt with a pink star stitched onto it and blue denim cutoff pants. From her footwear, a pair of black sport slides, it’s clear that she was coerced outside for the sake of this photo. My dad who clearly had a day off from work; he’s in a t-shirt and denim shorts, the most casual outfit he could ever conjure up. He also looks impossibly young, and while we wouldn’t lose him for another decade this is still the way I picture him in my head today.
We look happy—not yet complete, but still a family. That’s how I’ll always remember my first house.
The next house I moved into would be my home for nearly 14 years. It was a pale yellow when we moved in, but in a few years it would be painted a vibrant, barn red. It was a louder color than the rest on our court, but felt more representative of us. Over the years, subtle changes would be made like different flowers added to the landscaping and new shutters bordered around the windows, but it was somehow always the same. In the end, it wouldn’t be the actual physical house that I would miss, although there would come a longing to drive by just for a glimpse of that old red house, but the multitude of memories, big and small, that for me will always live in that house, playing on repeat.
My memories from the red house are a lot clearer. I don’t have to think so hard to differentiate between actual events that happened and ones that blurred together with dreams and imaginations. It’s the house where I shared a room with my sister and went to war with my brother over fickle things like the TV remote. It’s the house where so many of my scraps and bruises were fawned over and fixed with a bandaid, and an innumerable amount of family meals around a table that just barely sat the five of us comfortably. It’s the house where I read the letter my mom wrote to an immigration judge detailing how vital my dad was to our family and that losing him would be detrimental to our well-being and the house where I would learn, years later, that he had passed away. The best and worst of my life lives in that house. I still dream of my family’s footsteps walking down the sole hallway in the house, knowing like the back of my hand who was on their way to grab something from the kitchen just by the sound of their steps. Logically, I know that it wasn’t that house that made us us, but I think those creaky hardwood floors and unwavering walls worked their way into our foundation anyways.
However, this wouldn’t stop it from becoming clear that there was no room for grief in that house, and how could it when it was already so full of everything else good.
Our next house would be fully drawn up and designed by my mom, something immediately apparent if you know her and her taste. It’s a beautiful house: this I will boast about in large part because my mom planned it from beginning to end and because it really just is a beautiful house. It’s the one I still go home to when I’m back for the summer and odd weekends. This house is different in a lot of ways, maybe not quite as momental, but it’s home now and that alone still makes it special.
The window in my bedroom in the third house has become the one to sneak out of, and that kitchen island has become the one where we all assemble to do homework and browse online, and the fence in the backyard has become infamous around the neighborhood as the house with the goldendoodle so excited to see someone walk by that she’s on the edge of jumping over. The memories are different, but are somehow still inextricably tied to the new hardwood beneath our feet, something I didn’t believe to be possible after the red house.
Writing this now, it feels a little silly to realize that I thought there was some sort of imaginary limit on houses and how much happiness was allowed to happen in one. This theory has been disproved every time I’ve moved, and thought there was no possibility that it could become a home that was in any way comparable to the last. While this may be true –none of them are comparable – that doesn’t mean a new kind of belonging can’t emerge. Different isn’t bad, it’s just different.