What Does “Home” Mean?
Posted by Laura Jacqmin on 7/02/2009
Throughout my play Ski Dubai, my protagonist Rachel is unmoored and adrift in Dubai. She lives in corporate housing with a complete stranger, works an unfamiliar job in a foreign country, and has no real roots to speak of. She searches and scrambles for some sense of “home” without really knowing what home is to her.
I’ve been thinking about home lately and what exactly it means to me. Does it mean Boston, the city where I was born? Does it mean my parents’ house outside of Cleveland, where I grew up and where I still return to at least twice a year? Does it mean my latest apartment in Chicago, where I’ve just signed my fourth lease in a row? Or is it something more intangible than that: a space, yes, but also objects, and memories, and people, and events, all wrapped up into one?All told, now that I’m in my mid-20s, I’ve lived in four houses, three dorm rooms, and seven apartments, some for as little as a month, and some for as long as 20 years. I’ve collected photographs and kitchen utensils and furniture and used them to fill my space. I have things up on the walls, and things hanging in the windows, and books crammed into every available bookshelf. But is it mine? The windows are broken, but I have to call the landlord to fix them. The bathroom tile is cracked, but I can’t replace it. When it rains, little stalactites of varnish drip from the wood molding, but all I can do is scrub them away. It’s mine – almost – but not quite.
When I go back to my parents’ house, my childhood bedroom is still intact (except for new paint). I sleep in the same double bed I slept in more than a decade ago, and I sit on the same couch in the living room that my parents brought from Boston in the 1970s (still with the original, tattered upholstery because they can’t find the same fabric to recover it with). Small details have changed: my degrees are framed and hung on the wall, and my dad finally caved and bought a flat screen. But to this day, they have no microwave, no finished basement, and the same Formica countertops as they did when I was a child. It feels comfortable. It feels familiar. It feels right.
It feels like home.