always be moving
I don’t know where I want to be, but I know I don’t want to be here (in this body and or in this timeline)
If you know me, you know that I can’t stay in one place for very long. The longest I’ve lived anywhere—at least since leaving home for college—is a little over two years. Two years in any given apartment for the almost 10 years I lived in Brooklyn; two years in any given city since I left there. It is unhinged, and frankly, the situation has gotten unbearable.
I’m tired of moving. I’m tired of having no sense of permanence. However, I haven’t found the perfect place to live, and everywhere is also expensive for no reason, so I guess I’ll just have to keep looking.
If you’re curious about what keep looking looks like, here are some places I’ve looked at houses to buy and or rent this week: Baltimore, Palm Springs, Brighton (in the UK, not Brooklyn, be for real), Merida, the Algarve. Yesterday, my partner—who has even more wanderlust than I—started looking up cabins outside of Medellin. I’m comfortable saying that neither of us is exactly well.
The problem, I think, is that when we try to find a place to live, it’s less about where we want to be and where we don’t want to be. We moved to LA because we (mostly me) didn’t want to be in Brooklyn anymore (and I also thought I was going to be a TV writer hahahahahahahaha). We moved to Philly because we didn’t want to be in the suburbs of Maryland anymore, where we had moved temporarily to help out with my nieces during peak COVID. We moved to DC because… well. I’ll have to tell you that story later. It’s certainly not because I wanted to move to DC.
The point is, I don’t know where I want to be, but I know I don’t want to be here.
Here = DC. DC is beautiful, thanks largely to the many million-dollar Victorian houses sprawled about the four quadrants. But since I graduated from high school and left home and mostly stopped coming into the city, it has changed almost beyond recognition. It is… extremely gentrified. It’s like the time Black Crown Heights turned into White Crown Heights, but worse, and everywhere. The food is bad and expensive. The vibes are off. A lot of men are wearing boat shoes. It’s giving Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa.
And then there’s the vermin: the rats running alongside you on the sidewalk at night, the mouse carcasses in the park and on the curbs and everywhere else, the ginormous roaches. I’ve walked past mummified squirrels, crushed baby birds, and other unspeakable terrors. This past winter, people started putting sticks on top of dead rats in the park behind my house, I suppose to draw attention so that your foot wouldn’t accidentally make contact. To be fair, I did actually, literally step on a rat carcass in broad daylight a couple of months ago, because my beautiful, useless dog failed to alert me, and I only knew because of the popping sound of the carcass deflating as I walked down an otherwise beautiful street.
I threw those shoes away.
Here also = America. There are a lot of things I want that I’m not sure America can give me, like a small, walkable city that’s accessible and not full of racists flying blue lives matters flags on their homes and pick up trucks. Like, is there a town on the Hudson that will have me? Or are they going to run me out of the city limits with a burning cross? I don’t know. It’s hard to tell what’s my anxiety and what’s a legitimate fear based on, I don’t know, the history and the present.
There’s something else I’ve been thinking about lately: home, not only as a safe haven, but home as a place to go back to. I, for example, don’t have a place to go back to. My mother sold the house we grew up in 10 or 12 or 15 years ago (what is time??), because once her children were out of her home, she needed to upgrade to something bigger. I lived there for a couple of months a few summers ago and, well. Let’s just say it went very poorly. It is not a place to go back to.
The only other place I could ever really, truly, call home was my aunt’s house—a beautiful brick home on a corner, low-key in the hood, covered in ivy. But she sold it, and she’s also dead now. Unfortunate, really.
After my partner’s parents also sold their longtime home—the place he grew up in, the place we’ve visited for holidays—we’ve been talking intermittently about this idea of home and having a place to come back to. A place that’s, at the very least, semi-permanent. A place of our own. A place to gather, where our friends and our family can come to, and where our nieces can visit when they’re tired of terrorizing their parents and want to terrorize us instead. Also, I really want another dog. And I’m going to need to live somewhere for more than two years to make that happen.
But the question, as always, remains unanswered: Where?
unfortunately. the world is trash. everyone is white. everyone is diddy. you're better off being homeless. forever.