Home-O P2
G here: This post has been a long time coming, and we apologize for PHEELINGS’ temporary hiatus. We are alive. And, still deeply feeling. The explanation I offer up for our absence is the crux of this post: we’ve been busy building a home, failing at it, and eating Häagen-Dazs under the covers to cope.
There is a house built out of stone
Wooden floors, walls and window sills
Tables and chairs worn by all of the dust
This is a place where I don’t feel alone
This is a place where I feel at home
In Home-O P1 M theorized “home” as a space. He identified his wish for home to be a place of refuge where he can find himself “reflected on the walls.” Here, I conjure up a home in other people.
Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous discovery through No Exit is that “hell is other people.” I find myself mulling over the validity of this idea a lot in my head. Since no one’s ever been to hell and back, his play is really about hell-on-earth, aka life. And so, if “hell is other people,” then so is LIFE (and all its accompanying goodness and strife). Life is other people. Or, in other words: I only feel like a “somebody” when the people in my life are preventing me from feeling like a “nobody.”
Let’s transfer this thinking to the discussion of “home.” I only feel like a “somebody” when the people in my home are preventing me from feeling like a “nobody.” Spaces and places are very important to me, but they pale in comparison to what people can do for me. I’ll admit, sometimes a space is valuable because it provides me a retreat from certain individuals, or anybody at all. Such cases, though, only reinforce my belief that “life” is other people. People provide love. People provide conflict. People provide home.
Right now, home is what I share with M. I am referring here to something more than the upkeep of a house or the co-projects of our dog, this blog, and our sex lives. I am speaking about a sense of belonging that is more than feeling good inside a relationship. Relationships, be them good or stimulating or all-consuming, don’t necessarily provide, or sustain, a home. M and I collaborate on a shared existence that is - above anything else - mutually affirmative. Our home is a self-sustaining collaboration that spans spaces, needs, feelings, experiences, and other people; it is the welcoming into the world we co-write for each other every morning.
I tried to convince you a few posts ago that I wasn’t a sociopath. I hope these pheelings also convince you that I’m not an asshole. Exhuberance annoys me, loyalty scares me, and warm fuzzy sentiments disgust me - but I’m not an asshole. I’m a hardened cynical pragmatist who sometimes paints his fingernails. I know what I want and what I believe, and when others prompt me in any particularly rigid way my claws come out. My claws have been out quite a lot lately. Despite my clear vision of what home is, and regardless of the beauty and love involved in this vision, I am often confused and angry. I’ve learned that a home cannot be built overnight, and that although people are integral to a home’s construction and upkeep, they are capable of dismantling - in a single breath - what’s taken years to build.
In addition to our four cats and a dog, M and I have a human roommate, whom we deeply care about. Admittedly though, sharing our living space with her has been complicated and difficult. The other day she brought me to my metaphorical knees with this biting text message: “I feel like a guest in your home.”
My gut ached all day as I pondered the meaning of this pointed declaration.
Some context: the three of us bicker constantly about the upkeep of the house we share. M and I feel indignant because we perceive we are responsible for everything - cleaning being the number one area of contention - while our roommate likely feels that we are anal self-involved psychopaths (Ultimately, I’d prefer to live with that characterization than in a filthy space, but I digress!).
It’s been a week, and there is harmony again within our dynamic, but I still feel kinda crumby. My roommate’s description of herself as a guest in our home - although still a bit mysterious - has taught me the distinction between “house” and “home”; between shelter and something more. No matter what progress the three of us make living together as roommates, a home is not necessarily constructed. While I like to be able walk through my house barefoot and not have dirt-caked soles by the end of the day, clean feet do not make a home. A bathtub without grime is not love. And a glistening toilet does not affirm one’s existence.
When our roommate says they feel like more like a guest than a person who belongs in the house we share this is not a problem of space, but of people. She does not feel welcome. An inadequate dwelling is not the culprit; we are. Spaces can help facilitate mental health, productivity, personal growth, and all kinds of love, but they are not sources of such goodness in and of themselves. It has taken me many months to realize this distinction between “house” and “home” and to learn to direct my attention to people, as opposed to space, in my attempt to feel better, more comfortable, and more welcomed into the world.
Home, I think, is another word for affirmation, and things like “comfort,” “security,” and “belonging,” come with the territory. If I’m being honest and realistic, I don’t think M and I are capable of giving our roommate what she wants and needs. We’ll never be able to build a home together with her, but for the moment, we share the same walls, and so why not try to make something more meaningful and more generative of the situation?
Presently, I am fortunate to have M in my life, and to have both a clear understanding of what home is and how to live there with him by my side. But sometimes, some of us, don’t feel unconditionally valued and we don’t see ourselves affirmatively reflected on the walls. At some point, we are all guests to love and end up on somebody else’s doorstep - at the mercy of someone who is inside. Guests, in this sense, are not terrorists; they are in transit and in need.
Things change, people die, walls crumble.
So if you’re home, if you’re fortunate enough to have even the slightest understanding of what home can be and how to build it, then you better open up your fuckin’ door to those who wander.