Originally published on the Pastry Box Project one year ago today on October 10, 2014
I’m writing this from my parents’ guest bedroom. It’s odd being a guest in your own parents’ home. Despite this being the place where I was born, it hasn’t felt like home for quite a while. This room used to be my dad’s office, but when I moved out after college, he took over my old bedroom and this became the guest room. I didn’t really care then because I already had my own place, and whenever I came to visit my folks, we just hung out in the living room anyway. I never really paid much attention to the change.
Not until two years ago, actually. Two years ago to the day. I was sitting in this room, sitting on the bed because it’s the only place in this room to sit. I had all of my earthly possessions around me, not a square inch of carpet to be seen. The lease on my brownstone apartment in Brooklyn had ended at the end of September and I had chosen not to renew it. So with no idea where I was going next, I moved in to my parents’ guest bedroom at 30 years old. That will surely make you think about your life.
Fredrick and I knew we wanted to leave New York, but we had no idea where we wanted to go. We needed space and a slower pace, but didn’t know where to find it. When I was alone in my parents’ guest room, he was alone in his family’s home in rural northern Sweden, taking some time to decompress after quitting his corporate job of three years without a backup plan. Meanwhile I was running my business from an uncomfortable bed in a room that isn’t mine in a place I no longer consider home, tripping over duffel bags and boxes of books when I had to go to bathroom in the middle of the night, with no clue where I was going nor when I was going there.
Fredrick and I had decided to wait until he was back in NYC to figure things out, but less than a week into his five-week sabbatical, I was crawling out of my skin. Just as I am today, two years ago this week I was taking the 40-minute subway ride each day from my parents’ apartment on the Upper East Side to Brooklyn Beta to hang with the web elite. Back then I was telling tales of our intended adventures while trepidatiously not knowing the destination, and now two years later I know better than to even have one.
I have lived more in the last 24 months than I ever had in the prior 363 months combined.
We found home in the Florida Keys with our 16-foot Carolina Skiff docked out back, watching sunsets sitting in the open Atlantic Ocean with a bottle of wine, catching our dinner and grilling it up under the diamond-crusted sky. A year later we drove cross-country to San Diego, found home steps from the sand with a porch overlooking the Pacific, where surfers change out of their wetsuits with towels precariously tied around their waists, and in the distance pelicans skim the waves and whales breach during their migration south.
And on Monday, we bought a sailboat, a 37-foot sloop older than I am, and we’ll make her home next. We named her Jenny because Fredrick’s family tradition is to use the Swedish name days calendar to name stuff, and Jenny happened to be the name on Monday, October 6. Serendipitously and to our surprise, Jenny means “white wave,” and in some cultures “fair and yielding” and “God is gracious.” A perfect fit.
So as I lie here on my parents’ guest bed (more comfortable now because I made them buy a new one), I no longer long for a home. I’ve learned home is where the heart is, and my heart’s with Fredrick, so I’ll never be homeless again.
And now with Jenny, who knows where we’ll go next.
Originally published on the Pastry Box Project one year ago today on October 10, 2014
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