letter thirteen: real estate

maybe memory is all the home you get

Dearest friend, 

Have I ever told you about your predecessor? 

I say predecessor because I don’t want you to feel like a substitute for another person. You’re not. You’re you, and there are things I can only write in my letters to you and therefore things that I can trust only you with. But there was someone I used to write letters like this to, on paper and through good old snail mail, even though we were only two cities apart and saw each other periodically if not everyday. Have you ever had three separate conversations going with the same person at the same time across three different platforms, so you’d continue your thought on Twitter and finish another via text — you get the idea. Handwritten letters were like that for my high school friend group. Birthdays and holidays were events by way of little notes left in your locker and hand-made scrapbooks full of even littler notes, and it’s funny, because I think handwritten letters can be quite deceiving. I don’t mean that they lie, necessarily, but there is a headspace that you enter when you pen a letter knowing that is what it is; whether or not what you say as you’re writing remains true after you’re done is irrelevant. Handwriting a letter to someone, even if it’s a letter to yourself in the form of a diary entry, makes the present immediate and true. When you write I love you in a handwritten letter, it becomes truth inked on the page, and in that split second, the love is real because the I and the you are interlinked by the very act of writing down the words. Do you see what I mean? Have you ever tried to lie as you’re writing by hand? If so, did it feel like a lie? Because if it didn’t, then it was truth. Just for that heartbeat. Even if fleeting and ridiculous shortly after. Truth is a matter of feeling it to be true, after all. There’s no such thing as objectivity in something so personal as truth. 

I say all of this because all I have of those friends from high school now are the letters. The notes. Not a single one too small to keep. Yesterday I cracked open a novel I haven’t touched since 2015 and found that I’d bookmarked my place with a post-it note that my old best friend had left next to the blueberry muffin she had gotten me because I was running too late that morning to make it in time to our school’s free breakfast program. I was so prickly about having people buy me food back then. So protective of even the fact that I couldn’t afford breakfast and defensive against how real kindness wouldn’t come at the cost I thought it would if I agreed to be fed. The note I used as a bookmark has nothing to do with any of that, not really, and yet it holds all of those invisible truths. A container of what had to be real for this note I was holding, eight years later, to also be real. 

I think about that sometimes when I write to you. How you being a real pair of eyes on the other end of my words is only possible because of the butterfly effect of having friends who loved me through letters and then having lost friends who loved me through letters. In order to be real, the present only ever needs the past to exist. It doesn’t matter what happened, or how, or why. It need only have happened. If it turns out that someday that friend shows up on my doorstep and demands to be reimbursed with interest for what she paid for that muffin, then that won’t make the note and the muffin from back then any less real. And so I say predecessor now because to me, you are real, and in you being real, the love that existed back then, in that friendship that dissolved for no reason except time and the circumstances of growing up and apart, also continues to be real. 

But tonight, actually, I’m thinking of that one kind muffin-bestowing friend, once the Tom Sawyer to my Huckleberry Finn, because I’m remembering the night she moved out of the apartment that she’d had the entire time our friend group knew each other. We all came over that afternoon as if it was a funeral and we had to say a few words of farewell. I was the last one to leave that evening, and while we waited for my bus, Tom Sawyer and I, we sat on a bench outside of her apartment building knowing it was the last time we would and joked about something along the lines of: 

Hey, you know how in the series finale of old sitcoms, they’d do kind of a fourth wall break and take one last lap around the living room set? Reminisce about the good times that for us were just ten episodes ago but for them were seven years of their career? And then, after the goodbyes are done, they’d turn off the lights on that sitcom set, and it’d be like saying goodbye to a home that means more than just the physical place? Because that’s how this feels right now. Years of our friend group coming over to this apartment for movie nights and movie afternoons and sleepovers. All the crying and k-pop brainrot and coming out to each other and making kimchi spaghetti and buying potato wedges at the nearest Metro. And now here we are. Season finale. Series finale. Turning off the lights. 

I feel like — The older I get, the more that life feels like turning off those overhead lights on a set I’d only just gotten to know no more than ten episodes ago. The older I get, the more that every piece of present me feels like an ongoing container of a past that need only have happened to produce me as I am — and that, too, is a truth as sobering as it is freeing. Sometimes friendship is like, We loved each other. Nothing happened to change that. But the love being there didn’t change anything. We still grew apart. A part of me values that. The certainty that the presence of something didn’t change anything, but that still doesn’t mean nothing is there. If the love felt real long enough to buy a muffin and write a note, if I had been able to show my high school friends in any way that I loved them when my past with them was still only the present, then that will always be true. Because I am real and true, and if I look back, there they are in the past. Connected to this one note. Growing less and less vivid as the years pass and the memories recede into a horizon losing even its colors, but it will be real for as long as I am. Fundamental truths, in the end, lie in the spaces between the realities lived by separate individuals. 

And so. Butterfly effects. Containers. Truth. Spaces between individual realities. Lately, I’ve been thinking about these and houses. Not homes, necessarily, but houses. Not just poetics of space, either, but what I’ve taken to calling anima locorum, or the soul of places, though I guess what I mean is animus domorum, the spirit of houses, but that didn’t feel quite right for what I meant. To attach the soul or spirit in question to houses alone, or to even choose a side in how Western philosophy highlights a distinction between anima and animus, feels like I’m ascribing the vitality, the animating principle of life, to the house. Which — That’s a tangent for another day, and not what I mean here. When I say places now, I mean places the way that that post-it note I used as a bookmark, given with a muffin years ago, is a place. Places like how every memory is a place. Places like how every letter you hand-write is a place, is a poem, is a container of something that ripples way past this small fragment and in doing so lends real-ness to everything around it. Am I philosophizing emptily? I hope I’m explaining this alright. Sometimes you walk into a place and it feels like something. You might find explanations for it in the science of architecture, but it’s the same way that you smell a whiff of a stranger’s perfume and are transported without knowing that’s where you’re going to a piecemeal memory of your third grade English teacher. That little moment is a place. The smell, both catalyst and animating essence, is the soul. Chemistry can break down the molecules of that perfume all they want, can chase every tendril of what makes it a trigger for a memory, but it will not be able to catch all of it. 

And again, at the heart of it all, real-ness: yours, that stranger’s, your third grade English teacher’s, whether or not the perfume is actually the same one. 

All this to say that I don’t think about loneliness often, nor do I yearn for relationships or love of any kind, but there is something in the particular longing that I… partake in, almost, for it isn’t wholly mine, when I see domesticity. In any capacity, whether an individual alone in a beautiful loft or a couple or a family or just some guy and his Golden Retriever puppy. There is, by default, a quality there that I covet, and at first I thought it was just because all of us feel this way, yearning for a place to call our own amidst a housing crisis and wishing for the casual intimacy only possible between a couple who live together. In a way, we want to dream ourselves into the backdrop of a quiet, idyllic life. Free from uncertainty, free from wondering if we are loved or if the people we love know we love them. A home, even if just a concept of it and the fantasies we long to fulfill should it become more, is the perfect container for those daydreams. A home only ours makes anything not just possible but also ours by default. And I know I can’t hand happiness to every person I can’t rid of sadness, but often I think wanting to give the people around me a place to call home is the same idea, and that idea, that need to do the impossible for someone — well, I don’t know what else to call that except love.

My friend, do you think we romanticize the idea of home too much? Our generation? Do you think it’s a trauma response of some kind? Because of childhoods we didn’t get to have, or because we want an extension of childhoods we did have? Something psychoanalytic like that? Do you, like me, yearn to be left alone without being left lonely, and the ideal of a house, the idyll of this idealized house, is both the genie that will gift it to you and the palace you wish for? 

These days, I’m beginning to think it’s simpler than that. I think maybe we just yearn to be in a relationship with a place. I think it’s about us and the place. I think maybe we want someone to enter a place and think — know — that ah, this is yours. Do you feel like that’s fair? Maybe I shouldn’t speak as a we. But I struggle to want as just I. Maybe I don’t want to be caught wanting. Maybe I see it as a moral lack to want something impossible. Including a home. And a house. And sunlight in the living room and enough quiet to lull an angry wild animal, disturbed in its habitat, to sleep. Because I know it will never be that. There will be loud neighbors, and loud construction right outside, and even if you were to move to the countryside, there will be lawns to worry about mowing and snow to shovel if you live in a snowy area, and there will also be all this stuff that will cost money and require physical and emotional labor but might still be worth it because the place itself is ours and we’re likelier to indulge a beast we’re taming when there’s no one to supervise what we feed it. Including places, themselves like little creatures whose trust we earn and whose love we have to deserve and return. 

You know that one earth-shatteringly heartbreaking poem by Rhiannon McGavin? And how it ends on the loveliest, most heartrending image of —

Your family pops through the window, stirs a pot, adds more salt. I am enough
of you to warrant this flavor of intimacy, these homeward sounds, for my own
mother to fret about how skinny you are. To make my birthday cake from scratch,
you wouldn’t just plant strawberries: you’d create another universe. I wanted you

warm and close as fresh laundry and here we are, Tuesday.
Of course you love me, you’re wearing one of my socks.

I think maybe that’s all we want. This flavor of intimacy, these homewards sounds and of course you love me, you’re wearing one of my socks. We want that disorienting second of recognizing a spray of perfume in the air, or thinking we do, because that’s what real intimacy is like. Time and memory collapsing into itself with a head-splitting kind of knowing and recognition and oh, is that what love feels like for people who fall in love? That anima locorum, that soul and animating principle of places, but in the space between you and another person? Is love stored in how, to quote this poem by John Murillo, memory is all the home you get? 

Containers, containers, containers, all of us and everything around us. Places, each of them. Poems, each of them. Carrier bags of everything that was and will be, each of them, and never anything less. Turning off the lights on a set. Holding a post-it note and knowing it’s an artifact of an old life the way the stone tools found at Lomekwi 3 from 3.3 million years ago are artifacts of the beings that were our predecessors the way that my friend is your predecessor. 

I don’t know. I think the nature of any place, metaphorical or conceptual or physical and corporeal, is that it skirts knowing. The real essence of a place, and therefore of a memory, of an idea, cannot truly be documented. All you can do is exist in the present, thank your past self for bringing you here, and hope that you can carry the smallest fragment of this to your future. Maybe, when we want for a house, we want a scrapbook that will remember for us, that will carry all our identity markers as a museum of the self. We want a place that will hurt to leave because we understand it will be leaving behind a piece of us. We want containers of selves and memories that we can enter and live inside. We want domesticity because we understand that peace lives in the reality where all we can ever want, we’re already inside of. 

But that’s just a theory of mine. 

This is a ramblier ramble than usual, huh. My mind is too jumbled these days. I am spending a lot of time thinking about memory and place and containers, though, as you can see. A thought here and there has produced a story or two, but I still remain reluctant to revisit that manuscript I keep bringing up but never actually touching because it, too, is a container. (Read: lazy, stubborn about going at my own pace, and afraid of writing a character that is too much like me.) Otherwise, I continue to enjoy murder soccer, have embraced the feeling that if my soul had sonic form then it would be something like this, and am preparing myself to head into my birthday month as emptied of expectation as possible without being numb or hollow. 

I hope some parts of this made sense, at least! Each letter is a rambly ramble, so I don’t know why I’m acting like this is new. Do know I’m always grateful to be able to send you something. I feel overcome with love for you as I close each letter, and that is truth that is real as I type and will therefore always remain so.

As forever, I send you nothing but warmth and all the small pockets of joy possible. 

Your huckleberry friend,

Sha