Reflections from the Kitchenette Floor

You are twenty three years old.

You are twenty three years old, and you are alone in your brand new apartment.

‘Brand new’ like you can still smell the paint on the drywall, ‘brand new’ like the floors aren’t scratched from years of rearranged furniture and dog nails, ‘brand new’ like the appliances still have protective film over the buttons and screens. You’re mostly unpacked, but the walls are still bare and you’ve got a ‘miscellaneous’ box shoved in the corner of things you can’t find a home for. Your brand new apartment is a roomy studio, so you can see this box no matter where you are. It’s strangely haunting.

It’s sixty degrees, because you haven’t quite figured out the thermostat, and you have a desk chair in front of your TV because you don’t own a couch. Buying a couch is for adults; you feel like an imposter when you try to browse for one online.

You are twenty three years old in your brand new apartment, and it’s late at night, and you thought you’d feel different. Cool and confident, like in the movies. You imagined mature bottles of wine and home cooked meals in the kitchen, warm lights and eclectic, inviting furniture in a cozy living area. Maybe a potted plant or two on the windowsill, and your carefully curated collection of books and records and tokens artfully displayed like they’ve been there forever. Like you’ve been there forever. Like you would move into this place and feel, finally, your very own sense of self and security.

Instead, you feel very young, and very alone.

The walls are just drywall, the floor is just hidden cement under your feet. There is too much empty space, too much empty air, a generic and cold feeling that you can’t shake from the corner where you built your bed frame. Everything you’ve done in the past few weeks to remedy this feeling--tacking up photos and posters, slowly collecting Ikea furniture, a constant stream of music from your speaker--only makes you feel more like you’re simply occupying a space.

For some reason this is the night it all catches up to you, like water about to overflow a dam, and suddenly you’re crying for reasons you can’t put into words.

You are so homesick. You’ve never been this homesick. Not at summer camp, not on school trips, not at sleepovers, not on vacations. Maybe because even as a child, you would go to these places and have the comfort of knowing above all else, it would end. The summer would turn to fall, the school chaperones would pile you and your friends back into the buses, your parents would pick you up from a friend’s early in the morning, and then you’d be home. For all the fear and anxiety of new places and new experiences, you could always rely on the end to bring you home.

Maybe you’re crying because in the silence and the cold, empty space, you finally have to acknowledge that there is no end this time. This is it. You’re already home, but it doesn’t feel like it no matter how much you will it to. How did your parents do it? How does anyone do it? What are you missing so desperately that everything feels so wrong?

And you picture the last place your parents could stand to be in the same room together. The last place you could walk down the hallway and sleep on the floor of your sister’s room. The last place you sat at a real table in a dining room and shared the events of your day. A modest, middle class home in modest, middle class suburbs. The front door was a weird blue-green shade that somehow complimented the red brick enough that your parents never felt the need to repaint it. The first house that you got your own room in, the room where you did your high school homework and watched movies and painted the walls and slammed the door for no reason other than the fact that you were upset and you could. You think of the nights where you sat on the floor with your siblings and talked until you argued and then argued until you were laughing and then laughing until someone yelled to keep it down.

When you woke up on Saturdays it was to the smell of drip coffee, or the sound of early morning news, or the sight of sunlight tinted purple where it came through your worn out curtains. You were confident in the fact that you could walk downstairs and find your dad at the kitchen counter, or your mom on the sofa, maybe busy, but not too busy to check up on you. Your parents were fixtures in the house as much as the house itself was a fixture on the street. You were surrounded by the furniture they had picked out when they were as old as you are now, by family photos and the decorations you saw so often that you never really noticed or thought to question the origin of. You had a good, modest, childhood in this good, modest, house, but the details get fuzzier the further you move away.

You remember your parent’s bedroom, their queen size bed with the brown and white quilt that you can still feel the texture of when you imagine running your ten year old hands over it-- you know at one point they stopped sharing it, but you can’t remember when.

You remember the fancy wooden dining room table with the glass top, where your family sat in unassigned-assigned seats every night and said grace before a home cooked meal--but that too, eventually came to an end. There was a last time your family ate dinner together at that table, and you can’t remember it.

There was a last time your brother and sister sat on your bedroom floor with you, talking past bedtime, and you can’t remember it, and you are so homesick for it all.

What you do remember is the conversation in the living room where your parents explained what you already knew, and the ‘for sale’ sign that quickly went up and even more quickly came back down, and dividing your belongings between two places that never quite felt like they were yours.

And that’s where you ended up, for a few aimless years; drifting between two kind-of homes, no longer with a sense of permanence but maybe a new sense of independence. You pretended it didn’t bother you, that it was time for a fresh start of your own. You pretended that you didn’t have to convince yourself you were ready. You regathered your belongings and moved out, because that’s what twenty three year olds with full time jobs and part time college degrees do. You were looking for home, for that sense of permanence and belonging, so you think ‘hey, might as well make my own’, but despite your best efforts and good intentions there’s something missing.

You can’t figure out what.

Sometimes, now, you drive past that old modest house with the green door and red brick. You don’t really know why. It’s deeper than a curiosity, not quite a compulsion.

The new family has children’s toys in the yard. They repainted the doors and the shutters, a dark red that matches the brick too closely, in your opinion. But the shrubs by the porch are a nice addition. It’s something your dad might’ve done back then if he’d had the time. Or maybe he’d always had the time, but some grown-up instinct told him not to invest it in this piece of property that your adolescent instinct so strongly told you was permanent.

You are twenty three years old, and you want more than anything that naive, trusting worldview again, the one that let you move into a new bedroom and feel the warmth and security of someone who’d lived there a lifetime. When you lived in that bedroom, when you believed that everything would always be as easy as unpacking a few boxes, you dreamed of your independence and the space you would one day create for yourself.

But you are twenty three years old, and you have your independence, and you fought with tooth and nail to create that very space for yourself, and it all just feels so

hollow

and you would give absolutely anything to see your parents sharing coffee and watching the news, anything to sit on itchy carpet with your siblings and fight until you fall asleep, anything to feel that ball of homesickness in your chest with the knowledge that it’ll be okay, because you’ll be home soon, driving back to the house with the green door and red brick.

But it’s a red door and red brick now, and your parents who promised you in middle school they would never get divorced haven’t shared a cup of coffee in five years and your siblings are starting their own lives in states far away.

So really, what is there to do besides accept that for tonight, this does not feel like home, and you are the youngest, loneliest twenty three year old in the world--and then try again tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that, until you can finally say to the sickness and the anxiety, it’s okay, at least I’ll be home soon.