Homes I've Made

The following in a reflection on my time spent living in Washington, D.C. so far and my own inner quarrels with making my surroundings into my home.

One of my housemates, after months of failing to find some sort of homeostasis in her current living situation, finally moved out.  She spent her last couple of weeks at the house in an unspoken bout of misery.  Each night, she’d silently slither to the freezer, unwrap any arbitrary Healthy Choice or Lean Cuisine, nuke it till a whirl of steam, in all its cheesy potency, shone through the microwave, then silently shovel it back, hunched over beside the scarred oblong oak table.  Really, I don’t blame her.  We who eat beside, at, and against this visual, inelegant elephant are often equally lethargic and unaware.  We have congregated as a gang of misfits beneath a single crumbling roof"as we’ve traversed from all sorts of lands to seek entry-level opportunities in politics, human rights, law, you name it. Washington, DC is a place I’d felt drawn to"the optimal wind-spreading destination.  Yet it’s been months, and I’ve mostly been pacing myself, treading water"bound on a pursuit toward acquainting myself with the lay of the land.  I’ve been striving to attain comfort in a destination I hadn’t deeply considered and a culture I hadn’t tested. 

 

The district is, by amateur city planner terms, an ultimate city.  Every living entity is freakishly well branded and beautiful in all aspects, even a borough or a city block’s mode of gentrification or class dividing is wonderfully perfunctory, as a simple font color along each metro train car denotes differentiation and disparity.  I don’t really question the chillingly tangible city lines, though, as I have in other homes I’ve had"maybe because here the separation is made beautiful.  Washington, DC can almost do whatever it wants because, like a movie scene backdrop, it paints pictures of exposed brick beauty and farmer’s market-clad vistas, and uniformed politicians and staffers speaking in brash tones over one another, brandishing leather bound and stitched professional portfolios like unsheathed weapons.  The Zenith of the Capitol Building: an unbiased horizon and simple sky marker bringing together latte makers and house majority leaders in the dead of cold night.  Really anyone can safely meander past ropes and guards and Jupiter’s star, past the Shakespeare library and the first folio, past the French café, the congressional buildings, to the awesome pseudo-stratospheric juncture of earth and sky.  It’s in the evening under the dark sky, staring straight at the Capitol dome, that I think this city really is one of the greatest polestars of humanity.  And here I am: existing here, living here, waking here, sleeping here.  I can create it as whatever I want it to be and how I one day want to tell the story of my time here. It’s an art really"the way of transforming a place one lives to a home, and maybe one day I’ll advance to an intermediate-level craftsman.

 

Retrospectively, I think I studied philosophy for the sheer reason that I walked out of class lessons and round table discussions feeling better about myself"my broadened awareness created a living-learning linkage that had me ruined for life as a newfound religious deep thinker.  I was living better, thinking better, being better.  Most importantly I’ve discovered the philosophical standard of rebellion, and doing such against the absurd and stagnant of the world, breathing dynamism into an otherwise stale situation.  I first understood self-made happiness at the onset of my college career when my texts translated into a single, cohesive mantra that life is essentially created not given.  I’ve felt the same way about homes, especially this home.  It’s hard not to feel like I’m visiting Washington, DC when I can saunter down the manicured streets of NE, over to Union Station, which is a block from me, (mind you), surge through time via a sparkly white-walled metro car, and arrive at any number of cultural and political landmarks.  Me: the minority resident, Everyone Else: a meandering body with a map for a face.  I’ve talked to a few remaining friends and acquaintances from college, maybe even had the occasional run in with a fellow high school classmate or a friend of my sister’s when home for the holidays and the response to my new home is always fairly and bleakly the same:

 

>So, Leah, where are you living now?

>I live in DC

>That’s great, I went there one (and/or a few times)

>Ah, school field trip?

>Yes, and the missus and I do usually every other year or so.  We just love to walk around Georgetown.

 

No, most of the hometown folk don’t have a missus, nor would they defer to a lady friend as a missus, but they do generally react in bewilderment at the thought of my Washington, DC resident status.  And so do I.  I am convinced it took me until my teens to make my childhood home into a real home, through repetition of thoughts I could think until a certain age, associations it took years of experience to form, and feelings I couldn’t make myself have, but I could certainly allow to seep through my veins.  I don’t know how long I have here, but I know it’s certainly immeasurable to the length of time from one’s birth to bat mitvah.  But then again, I’m older, wiser, and strangely, more imaginative, I’m better at creating situations out of canvases.  And the district is a canvas, predisposed to being painted upon with the same picture.  Here’s how I’m changing it up:

 

The warming up process is eerily similar to my experience of going to college in Baltimore.  Now, to clarify, there is indeed a very poignant difference in association of the two following sentences:

 

1.    I went to school in Baltimore

2.    I lived in Baltimore

 

Recently, I told someone I lived in Baltimore.  Their follow-up was, “What did you do there?”  Well, I went to school there.  But I also lived there.  I knew all the immediate roads and alleyways and even secondary streets like I knew my own name because the simple state of unfamiliarity was frightening to me, practically synonymous with aloneness.  When I met my boyfriend in Baltimore, he instilled this in me"the ultimate motivator: the most important ingredient to achieving comfort is discomfort.  Times when I feel I don’t like it here in DC, I find I’m too comfortable.  Because, really, it is so easy to be comfortable here.  Everything sparkles and gleams, which is ideal, right?  But the grime, the square pegs are what positively jostle a person on a path towards an all-embracing relationship with one’s home.  I really mean the inclination to move, not so much a discomfort in the sense of hurling oneself into rough-n-tumble neighborhoods, or anything of the like, but simply moving about, ducking down alleyways that may surprise you, that may, by their own acute qualities send you to a Tuscan village or a colonial-era city street, clad with brownstones and horse docking stations. 

 

Now, one may think this a derivation of sightseeing, therefore classifying me a sort of tourist in my own land.  Incorrect: home, in my experience, is only found in the melodic routine of exploration.  It is merely the case that my suburban split-level in which I lived and grew for eighteen years was not America’s capital, thus possessing, as its greatest sights, a shopping mall, a bowling alley, a couple Italian restaurants, and a photo of Bradley Cooper posing with an employee taped to the wall of the local bagel shop.  This is not to demean the limited availability of activities and resources within my hometown, but rather to say: it was easy to know the place and even easier to make it my home.  This is a daunting world of its own, though rather small relative to other great cities (so small actually that one could live in two other states [Maryland or Virginia]) and still, according to job search site and newspaper language, dwell in the “DC Area.”  And now to my self-developed reason why many come and go:

 

There is too much to know and too much to have.   As visitors, we are often buckled by the overwhelming amount of opportunities accessible to us, but we love it.  It’s the perfect scenario"to have countless opportunities at one’s disposal when crafting the perfect visit.  And as residents of a place, we’d rather be familiar with our surroundings to a point of memorization"I know I’ve felt that way.  This isn’t a visit for me, though.  So how do I craft the perfect stay?  Certainly not through the fabrication of laundry lists: ventures attainable point-by-point, yet insurmountable in whole.  I’ll likely never have an answer to this city, aside from the fact that it’s perfect storefronts and mirage-like dusty pathways lined with the world’s best historical and cultural entities, it’s exemplary system of transit, it’s standards of cleanliness are attributes I’ll likely never find again, at least not bundled and packaged into a perfect storm of radiance.  I’m trying to call it home; I’m trying to make it something, and whether I succeed or not, I’ll remember X amount of time in which I was the best visitor I could be.  That time I stayed, making a place into an awesome place.  Even if my tricks and tactics fell short of creating home, I’ll have the walk to the Zenith memorized, the steps taken through the cold, past Jupiter’s star, which sits above the Library of Congress on a cold, clear night, past the French café, the guard, the outdoor elevators. 

 

My mark will be left in the form of walking out my door.