BlogMas 2019 Day Ten - One by Seven

Hello.

There are memories that will easily collapse in the palm of your hands occur sporadically. And, how beautifully brittle are these things? And, how easily these things make you hopeful for more of these evocations? And, isn't that the purpose they serve? To create genres of hopes to have us eternally believe in magic happening?

There's a memory for me, of contentment and, of woe. I've never felt placidity that rivalled the one I felt each time I was home, all by myself. Prior to that, I'd never fathomed just how enervating a mechanism it is to make a house feel like home. It is, truly, just another feeling. There's no modus operandi that to take place. As evolved beings, we always compensate for lack of normality with objects. Not until I emptied that apartment, did it dawn on me that I hadn't found the need to add in a lot of compensations in it. It simply grew on me, and turned into a home. I can unambiguously point the definite moment when that happened. It was 2017, and New Year's Eve. It was the first one that I was spending alone. Literally, all alone. Not a soul around me. I'd figured, pretty much by Christmas, that I wasn't going to be anticipating to anything for the night. And, like a fool, just to get out, for the sake of it - because come evening, everywhere was going to be packed (I mean, we're talking about Bombay here) - so I could feel some human contact, get coffee, smile at my barista, I ended up at the studio I was working in at that time. I did no work. I sat there, and read up on news and artists. As expected, I didn't feel in the best of spirits, for obvious reasons. To also be perfectly honest, December 2017, was personally a quite edgy, and an emotionally discomposed month where I was antsy. So, on the way back home I ordered some sushi as a little pick-me-up; and it was barely eight in the evening, and there was hell to pay for the traffic. The only thought that constantly was calming my momentarily very baleful mind, was that I needed to be home, with my drink and movies on. I'd never addressed to the apartment as home before. That's all I'd ever called it before that - the flat. I gathered that night that I could be whoever and however I wanted to be there, while feeling secure. When I'm anxious, or upset, or hurt, and it bothers me to the point where I can't put it on the back-burner anymore, I go quiet - I cut every possible contact for a while and reel within, until I'm able to internalise it all, and pull through. For as long as I can recall, I had to recede into my own head to help myself. My home was the perfect physical embodiment of my shell - there was simplicity, and there was warmth, with undertones of candour.

As a designer I've always felt that we're a result of our spaces. Plain and simple. And, the wonderful thing about spaces is they multitask better than any human can. They erase time, and they reinvent you. There are a lot of different answers to be sought in life. And, mostly they're external. For me, for over three years, I was living inside one. I frequently see people looking at spaces and judging right away the kind of energy they feel. What they don't get is spaces feel our energy, too. What, and how you feel in a space is not a saleable equation, it's a barter. I've been to a lot of fantastic places while living in another city. And, at the end of the day, I always wanted to be home. I used to worry that I probably feel so attached to the apartment because the whole adulting business was kicking in, and maybe I was overwhelmed for I was yet to find my niche and tribe in this new city - somewhere I could feel safe. But, as I kept meeting new people, and I made friends for a lifetime in the time that I was there, I knew my initial instincts were right. Also, funnily enough, it was my mother who'd gone ahead and inspected the apartment out of a few options, because I was tied up at work. The only thing I asked her to look for was anything she thought felt cosy and safe. And, boy, did she get it spot on.
"You'll like the vibe of that house", those were her exact words to me at the time - the vibe of the house! The moment I walked in on a Sunday to check it out, I knew why she said that. Large windows, lots of cute trees to look at outside from those, but sweet little rooms. I hated monsoons in Bombay. I found them to be baneful for routine existential activities. But, come weekend mornings in my bed or on my couch, looking out the window, that house did the impossible for me, and made me love monsoons only for how it looked outside of my window, and how the gust made my home smell like a wonderland.

I adamantly slept in my room (there were two), till the last day that I had to vacate the place. Even after all the furniture was moved out, it was me, on a thin mattress and my large windows on my last night in the house. For a lot of people, home doesn't mean much, or it's wherever their people are, or their work is. For me, my home was my home. And, I had to be in some of the lowest points of my life to really fall in love with it, and actually have a clarity of what home means to me.

More tomorrow. Until then.

Artist: Loris F. Alessandria

Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,

A.