states of matter
The idea of home is both simple and complex. A house can provide shelter, but a home is something more elusive. Sometimes solid, at other times fluid, it can transform like matter itself, evaporating and reforming elsewhere.
My parents still live in the house that I grew up in. The furthest we ever moved during my childhood was to the house next door and back, my parents packing up and carrying things between the two driveways while I was away at university. Nearly twenty years later, I have multiple tattoos commemorating my childhood home: marks of memories that came flooding back when I returned for the holidays, suddenly re-returned to my place of origin.
Everything had been reinstalled almost exactly as I remembered it. In each room, updated furniture reclaimed the footprints of the pieces that stood before them, stirring strange, vivid memories I wasn’t even aware I carried.
One of my tattoos recalls a small wall fountain shaped like a fish head, surrounded by avocado green tile. It was the sound of the fountain that triggered the flashback more than the sight of it. I couldn’t have been older than three or four, bare feet on the sunburnt brick surrounding the built-in patio furniture typical of the 1970s when the house was built (and beloved as climbing equipment by me and my brother in the ‘90s).
I was about to witness my first science experiment. A block of ice was produced with a flourish and placed on the speckled yellow tile of the tabletop. “What do you think will happen to this ice block in the sun?” my father asked me. I don’t remember my response, only my impatience to return to playing in the garden. But I do remember my surprise and delight when I was called back to find nothing but a puddle of water where the ice block had been, the sound of the fountain trickling gently behind me.
This early lesson in the states of matter stays with me, not only for the sentimental weight of the memory or the practical value of its applications, but for the quiet metaphor it offers: a conceptual bridge between physical and emotional realms.
Just as water transforms between solid, liquid, and gas, so too can our sense of belonging, identity, home.
Since I left my parents’ house at eighteen, I’ve lived in more than twenty-two homes across six different cities, some for just a few months, others for a year or two. Whether driven by self-discovery, the pursuit of opportunity, shifting relationships, precarious housing, economic necessity, or simply a desire for something new, this pattern of near-constant movement is ongoing.
I acknowledge the privilege of this position. I write this knowing that the ability to move by choice, to look back on a house with nostalgia, is a luxury denied to so many—those whose homes are destroyed, whose movement is forced, whose sense of belonging is interrupted by violence, not curiosity or change. My parents’ bungalow at the end of a cul-de-sac represents the kind of solidity and permanence many only dream of, a foundation of memory and fledgling identity that has remained largely unchanged over time. A place I can return to.
As I stand at the cusp of yet another move (my eighth in just under five years), I feel deeply attached to my current apartment. Its pink tiles and curved walls have accommodated me for just over two years. Its high-ceilinged rooms have witnessed the rise and fall of a relationship, accepted new bodies in place of the one that left, absorbed gasps of pleasure, teary-eyed laughter, fits of joy and pain and boredom.
I am the sum of all the houses that held me, the experiences I had between their walls.
It’s difficult to imagine these places don’t bear traces of us too—not just physical ones like height charts notched into doorframes, but intangible residues of lives lived: echoes of identity, particles of proof that we were here, that we loved, that we changed, and were changed.
If a house is a container, then home is the liquid it holds, shifting in state, adapting to the form of its surroundings. Home remains both place and presence. Like water, it flows through time and memory, sometimes confined, sometimes free, always reshaping and being reshaped by the lives it touches, carried in bodies that move more like tides than roots (with fish head-shaped tattoos in the crook of their wrists).
My parents still live in the house that I grew up in. The furthest we ever moved during my childhood was to the house next door and back, my parents packing up and carrying things between the two driveways while I was away at university. Nearly twenty years later, I have multiple tattoos commemorating my childhood home: marks of memories that came flooding back when I returned for the holidays, suddenly re-returned to my place of origin.
Everything had been reinstalled almost exactly as I remembered it. In each room, updated furniture reclaimed the footprints of the pieces that stood before them, stirring strange, vivid memories I wasn’t even aware I carried.
One of my tattoos recalls a small wall fountain shaped like a fish head, surrounded by avocado green tile. It was the sound of the fountain that triggered the flashback more than the sight of it. I couldn’t have been older than three or four, bare feet on the sunburnt brick surrounding the built-in patio furniture typical of the 1970s when the house was built (and beloved as climbing equipment by me and my brother in the ‘90s).
I was about to witness my first science experiment. A block of ice was produced with a flourish and placed on the speckled yellow tile of the tabletop. “What do you think will happen to this ice block in the sun?” my father asked me. I don’t remember my response, only my impatience to return to playing in the garden. But I do remember my surprise and delight when I was called back to find nothing but a puddle of water where the ice block had been, the sound of the fountain trickling gently behind me.
This early lesson in the states of matter stays with me, not only for the sentimental weight of the memory or the practical value of its applications, but for the quiet metaphor it offers: a conceptual bridge between physical and emotional realms.
Just as water transforms between solid, liquid, and gas, so too can our sense of belonging, identity, home.
Since I left my parents’ house at eighteen, I’ve lived in more than twenty-two homes across six different cities, some for just a few months, others for a year or two. Whether driven by self-discovery, the pursuit of opportunity, shifting relationships, precarious housing, economic necessity, or simply a desire for something new, this pattern of near-constant movement is ongoing.
I acknowledge the privilege of this position. I write this knowing that the ability to move by choice, to look back on a house with nostalgia, is a luxury denied to so many—those whose homes are destroyed, whose movement is forced, whose sense of belonging is interrupted by violence, not curiosity or change. My parents’ bungalow at the end of a cul-de-sac represents the kind of solidity and permanence many only dream of, a foundation of memory and fledgling identity that has remained largely unchanged over time. A place I can return to.
As I stand at the cusp of yet another move (my eighth in just under five years), I feel deeply attached to my current apartment. Its pink tiles and curved walls have accommodated me for just over two years. Its high-ceilinged rooms have witnessed the rise and fall of a relationship, accepted new bodies in place of the one that left, absorbed gasps of pleasure, teary-eyed laughter, fits of joy and pain and boredom.
I am the sum of all the houses that held me, the experiences I had between their walls.
It’s difficult to imagine these places don’t bear traces of us too—not just physical ones like height charts notched into doorframes, but intangible residues of lives lived: echoes of identity, particles of proof that we were here, that we loved, that we changed, and were changed.
If a house is a container, then home is the liquid it holds, shifting in state, adapting to the form of its surroundings. Home remains both place and presence. Like water, it flows through time and memory, sometimes confined, sometimes free, always reshaping and being reshaped by the lives it touches, carried in bodies that move more like tides than roots (with fish head-shaped tattoos in the crook of their wrists).
