Kiana

I never thought I’d say this, but I am offended by my living space. Not offended in that I’m not on good terms with the people I am living with (who need to be given special care sometimes), but offended as in I am constricted by it. There are days when I choose to take the long walk home because I don’t want to even touch the door handle of our house. One half of our house is made of concrete, the other half a combination of different kinds of lumber and wood. I have been living here for five years now; in those five years I’ve tried creating a home by way of ornamental plants, lovely music on speakers, taking in pets and friends. Sometimes it’s like that, and sometimes it takes and straps me in, leaving me unable to breathe and wade through school work, personal emotional mazes, friend drama, et cetera.

My grandmother and I took to cleaning our house this weekend: I scrubbed the floor raw of dirt and my departed dog’s ticks, but not enough to make me feel fully unencumbered by its virtual stench and stink—something I always imagined houses, or even homes, to be made of. I liberally doused kerosene on a tick-infested portion of a wall, anxious over what would become of the little crawly ones, and thankful that they just fell right through. When I was done, I was reminded of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude; of how the parasites and infestations that manifest in that house are a byproduct of not being wakeful enough in one’s space, not generating enough care, a latent abandonment of some sort. I wanted to rub the whole house raw and clean, flip it from the inside out, but then I remembered the house is not a paper house, not a play thing, alive with creepy crawlies in the corners.

I pause and ask myself what I want: Something close to clinical, where the walls are white and where I can sustain my own life—my flowers’, my pets’, my friends’. I have always dreamed of cooking—preparing something, a snack maybe—for my friends whenever they want to come over and rest, which I think is the only one thing I’m absolutely willing to give in my relationships, to make up for my lack of friendship touchy-feely-ness and corniness.

I wonder aloud, online if I ever will cultivate a home like this, an imagined ideal, like Jack and Rose’s “To the stars!” monologue in Titanic, where the cupboards are clean and there is always something going on—music playing, a page of a book being turned, water boiling, or the smell of orange peel permeating the air. ♦