My Childhood House is An AirBnB

James Torgerson / V Mag at UVA

There is a grief inherent to the word was. 

I was from Alaska. It was in America’s last frontier that I learned the many things that make me who I am. I found determination at the top of a rock wall, the voice of a coach I can no longer remember echoing in my ears, gritty chalk rubbing beneath my fingernails as my hands cramp.  I found family in the back offices of a church while holding the tarantula in Father Blue’s office. I found curiosity while digging in the dirt behind my best friend's house, weird rocks and BB darts weighing down my pockets.

I called Alaska home. It wasn't the only place. New Jersey was home because it's the beginning of everything – where I came home from the hospital, where I took my first steps. Florida was home because it was where I became who I am – where I took the pieces of me I found in Alaska and forged them into the version of myself I am today, where I carved a space for myself in a new place yet again.

Those places were home: we moved from Alaska when I was nine and I have not stepped foot in the town of Juneau since. In my head, the house I lived in is static, never changing. 

That house was mine, but there is grief inherent to the word was. Looking at the photos on the Airbnb listing brings it all roaring back.

The walls looked the same. The stairs had the same number of steps. My sister’s piano wasn’t in the corner. My father’s desk wasn’t pushed against the wall. My mother’s cookbooks weren’t stacked on the kitchen counter. The traces of the life I had lived there, the people I had loved there, were gone, dragged out in boxes and suitcases that would never see those walls, those floors, those windows, again.

I can still see myself there. My ghost still haunts those halls, and I see glimpses of them in the photos. As I stare at those pictures, I no longer see my home, but my house. A place for existing, but not for living, not for loving. 

There is a grief inherent to the word was.

There was a home in New Jersey. I took my first steps there. We drive past it every time we are near it. We sold that house years ago, and I will never walk in it again. 

There was a home in Florida. There was a bedroom with a single, bright orange wall that I painted with my mother. I danced and loved and grieved while next to that orange wall. It's been painted over, now, and no trace of me exists in that house.

These places aren't home. They are shrines, stops on a pilgrimage I can never complete. They hold versions of myself I will never again meet, ghosts of me who lay dead and buried in the backyards I once called home.

Those places were home. Yet those homes were never given, but rather crafted. Home is something I carve out, hands bloody and nails jagged.

There is possibility inherent in the word “is”, and this place is where I live, so I carve out footholds for myself as I climb my ways towards something better. 

My climb starts in a college town in Virginia.

There is a room in Watson-Webb. It holds flowers in thrifted vases and a painting I made with a hallmate after a bad night out. When I walk back to that dorm, I tell myself I am carving a path home. 

There is a kitchen in a house on Montebello Circle. I slip in through the back door, spooking her as I dump my bag in the dining room. As we dance and gossip and dream, socks slipping against the tiled floors, we make that kitchen home. 

There is a room at the back of the WTJU studio. It holds my flock of paper cranes, posters from old shows, and a disco light that always seems to be broken. As I turn on my mic early in the morning, that studio is home.

  Home is the space I take up in my hallmate’s mini fridge my first year because mine is too small, the drive to Lake Anna as Noah Kahan blares through the speakers. Home is the nap I take on the lawn on the last day of classes, the passenger seat of my partner’s car as we speed down Skyline Drive, the feel of the Shenandoah Mountains under my feet. Home is what I carve out, and I have carved out this life, for however long I am allowed to have it. 

Carve out a home for yourself. That way, when your childhood house is turned into an Airbnb, you still have somewhere to live in, love in, and dream in.