Last summer, my mom and I became homeless. Mom had been out of work for several months and the waiting list for public housing in my hometown is a year long, so Mom had a talk with the pastor of the church she sang at. We put our stuff in storage, sent our cat off to stay with my aunt and, like a nineteenth century British novel, we started sleeping in the upstairs guest room of the parsonage. I use the word “sleeping” loosely, because I spent most of that summer awake late into the night, trying to ground my homeless body in a reality I tried my best to ignore.
It’s impossible to describe being homeless, and I say that as someone who was in one of the best possible situations a homeless person could be in: I had a bed, food, hot water, Pastor Renee and Pastor Richard’s endless kindness and generosity. But I was still terrified and ashamed and trying my best to bottle everything up tight in my chest where no one could see it.
If I stop and think about it, the only physical, stable sense of home I’ve had these past few years has been the Pipe Dream office, and it’s been that way since I joined the copy desk in January 2013. Home has been 3 a.m. deadlines and soggy French fries and never enough sleep. I can’t tell you how many issues of Pipe Dream I’ve read over the years, and have bitched about having to read, but now I’m crying in bed because I only have two issues of Pipe Dream left to read. I feel like I’m about to be homeless again, but this time it’s my heart that’s getting displaced.
But that’s the nature of life, right? It’s constantly transitional. The Pipe Dream office, my desk, my chair, the places my mom and I lived before we became homeless: they aren’t mine anymore. My mom eventually got her own place again, but even that doesn’t feel like mine. Like everyone else, I’ve tried to find a physical space to serve as a home for my lost soul, but three weeks out from turning 23, I’ve come to accept that a room with four walls is never going to be a thing I can count on.
But I know what is mine. I realized something this semester, in between beds, in between homes, in between classes and days and Pipe Dream productions. I don’t have a bed in my mom’s new place or a bed at my dad’s house, and I do not know where my next bed will be — but I look at the people I love and I’m home.
That’s the home I know; my mother’s hugs, my dad’s laugh, my sister’s biting sarcasm. Home is movie nights at Michaela’s, three-hour phone calls to Rachel, aimless car rides with Ashley, wasted hours not doing homework in the Pipe Dream office with whomever is in there. Home is a pair of green eyes behind thick-framed glasses. I know what my home is. I always knew I wanted to write about love for my senior column, but it turns out that writing about home is the exact same thing.
So to everyone I’ve been fortunate to love, be it for the past few months or the last 23 years, thank you for giving me a home. Thank you for your smiles and your laughs and your shoulders and your beds. Thank you for giving this existential nihilist the most beautiful sense of purpose in the world.
Home as a room with four walls is much less satisfying than home as a person I can wrap my arms around. Luckily for me, I’m going to go to school today and wrap my arms around all the people here I love. I’m going home.
Katherine Dowd is a senior majoring in English.