The house with green walls

I’ve built a home for myself in a house that is not mine; by all means. I loan it from someone else. But a home does not equal a house. A home does not equal possession at all.

I’ve built this home, and now I have to leave it.

Thursday afternoon. My workday was nearly done; I longed for a break, and perhaps a cup of coffee I sure shouldn’t have. My phone pinged with an email, which I opened, absent, running on autopilot. But two lines in, my stomach dropped. A termination notice. An expiration date for the home I had built.

It feels different to move out when you are an immigrant. You look around and see a construct, bits and pieces of your story that weren’t there before, or that you carried over from somewhere else. There’s an impermanence, a fleeting quality to it; the notion that this home is temporary, no matter how long you settle in. You remember the friends who came over, the people you invited into your home and your life. You remember the visitors who crossed oceans to sleep on your couch. You feel pride. You want to cry. You think you need to bottle it all up because you have a termination notice in hand. But feelings tend to spill.

I am spilling, right now, all over my rug. The rug I picked after painstaking online research, trying to find a match to the color scheme I made up for my living room. I see the china cabinet filled with trinkets and keepsakes. That every time I travel I bring something back to decorate it. The wonky plastiline figure my nephew made when he visited still sits there, in honorable display. I see the many fairy lights and lampshades I acquired over the years, the thrifted typewriter, my prized possession. The photo wall I make a point to updte every time I visit my hometown. The insane yellow cabinet I thought would be a great addition to my bathroom.

I see the green wall that took me an entire weekend and 1,5 season of The Office to paint. And it’s the wall that makes me tear up. It felt so good when I finished it. I still think of that moment as the moment my house became a home; I could finally see myself there, not just inside of it, and it tasted like victory and belonging and joy. It tasted like the brownie I baked on that same evening to celebrate feeling at home. And how different it feels to build all of it, the place and the feeling, when you are so far away from your once home.

I am mourning moving away from this house, even though everything in it will come with me. But everything else, that which is not tangible—the first home away from home, the late nights walking through the park and feeling the familiarity of your neighborhood—will stay behind. And I will build a new home, because that’s what we do (except this time, I suspect, it will be much easier.)

I shall leave behind blank boring walls, like a good tenant, and take the feeling with me. Bottle it up for a rainy day.