One year ago today I moved into my new apartment, the third apartment in the same building in which I've lived since 1998, when I first moved to San Diego. As apartments go I'm still kind of getting used to it. It took me about 8 years to view the last one--which I lived in for 10 years--as "home." But then again the concept of home has always been a strange one for me.
When I dream of home, I almost always dream of the house I spent my youngest years in. I lived there from birth through about the beginning of high school, when my grandparents died and we moved into their house. My parents lived in that house until they both died (about 9 years apart), and I often visited them there. But my dreams of home are almost always of that first house. I don't know why.
I do like this new apartment, but I wonder if somewhere, deep in the dark and cobwebbed recesses of my mind, if I just look at any apartment I've lived in as just a locker where I keep my stuff and sleep and eat. I have never had the urge to own a home. It's just too much work, and probably too much responsibility for me (that explains the whole lack of family, kids, and wife thing, too, probably, if we're going to take the time to bargain-basement psychoanalyize me...and really, I wish we wouldn't. There are far more fun things to do.). So maybe the very transient nature of just renting an apartment has taken its toll on my fragile psyche. Still...I have lived in the same building for over 12 years now. That must make me some kind of common-law resident, right?
I suppose at some point I'll come around and view this place as home. After all, all my stuff is here, right? And I do enjoy coming home and settling in for the night and just closing the blinds and shutting the world out. And I guess that's what home is, isn't it? A little port in the storm, a place to hang your hat, a refuge from the outside world. All those things describe this still kinda-sorta "new" apartment for me, thankfully. Which is good, since I just signed on for another one-year "tour of duty."
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