Defining A Home By Time

I woke up today to gray skies again. The gray of Paris has bothered me lately. I had not minded the gray before, and never as a child in Seattle, but now I miss the sunlight and the warmth and the colors absent not only in the sky, but in the architecture too. The buildings here are soft whites and light beige, with gray rooftops and wrought iron balconies. Paris is beautiful, but it is not colorful like Madrid or Lisbon or Budapest and I miss the color in these places and in Madrid especially, where we spent the summer. 

The Parisian summer disappeared quickly and fall settled before its time. The leaves are falling and will continue to fall for some time. Many of the trees are still green. 

My hands are cold as I write at the cafe. I am in shorts, the only one in shorts today, still not yet ready to turn them in for the winter. I could wear shorts all year long if it was permissible, and in Seattle I did, but here, in Paris I would feel foolish. 

We are still between apartments, staying in an AirBnb. We are looking for a permanent place to live, by permanent I mean a year. I cannot imagine signing a lease for longer, but I do like the possibility of this next home being one we will live in for many years. The longest I have lived anywhere in my adult life was two years. I am afraid of commitment, of being stuck somewhere I don’t want to be and it’s always been place I have been afraid of the most. Place is the easiest for me to define, it sets so much of the tone of who you are and I have both liked and disliked, chased and ran away from, parts of myself in many of the places I have lived. 

I don’t know how to assign a numerical value to all the places I have lived. I have lived in many places. A month in a place can be more meaningful than many months or a year and a year can often feel less consequential than a month here and there. 

I spent much of my adult life living nomadically, moving and have had many homes. Some I almost don’t remember, many I miss, sometimes for weeks at a time. It is impossible to create a past self. I don’t want to go back, I only want to romanticize those nights in Thailand at a Southeast Asian dive bar—-

The romance has finally, after some years, started to fade and I can only hold my sons and Paris accountable for this change in myself. These, of course, are easy definitions, explainable in simple words, but more must be said and more later. 

Today I am romanticizing nowhere and it’s a beautiful feeling to wake up and feel like where you want to be is nowhere, but where you are.