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February 10, 2007
Away at home
You’ll settle down soon enough, E said, not realizing she had said those exact words a couple of months earlier.
After some constant insistence from N, we finally moved into the transit apartment we’ve been trying to occupy for a long time. Moving into transit apartments is never a good thing when you have actually reached your destination. It just took us about a month to find a place of our own in New York. And soon after, in just a couple of weeks, everything had found their own place.
It has now been about three months since we arrived, and we’re hit by the slowness of pace. Like the human body that had been hit by flu, e-ver-y-thing seemed sluggish, infected with malaise.
The kids are constantly confused about where home actually is. They go looking for their shoes when it is time for our guests to go, thinking they have to leave too. My socks do not travel the same way my work shirts do. My camera bag is in the bedroom, missing most of its contents.
Perhaps the biggest disappointment to not having a permanent place to stay is that though we have now physically returned back home, I can’t really be there – at least, not as much as I want to be, or not as much as I could be. Having to constantly switch places is like traveling through planes that require an incredible amount of effort to go across. And when you do get across, it takes time to gather yourself together.
Our transit apartment is a nice place to live, though I cannot imagine bringing our own furniture up three flights of stairs… only to move them out again in a couple of months. Space-wise, it’s about two to three times bigger than our last apartment, and had just recently renovated. Having just spent a few weeks, the space is still a bit bare, a bit too disinfected. Its character is derived from a cracked window, a small area of peeling paint, and minor blemishes, all amplified by the overall sterility of the surrounding.
We were nonetheless very lucky to even get the apartment - and it was not without help from people who understood, to whom we thank.
Now, instead of having to have to stay in two places, we have one. We still have a lot of stuff at our parents’ though. The boxes at mine’s are in the hundreds, many are still inaccessible, being stored too close to each other. I am not looking forward to going through the boxes when we finally move into a proper place – not with the very likely prospects of finding something broken in the trans-Atlantic shipment.
My boxes have been opened and resealed repeatedly. I do this to slowly get essentials from storage, just as I am slowly piecing together some of the pieces. Orphaned from home in our own home, we feel homesick.
Posted by quickness at February 10, 2007 09:40 AM
Comments
Oh my God! What a photo! What kind of camera are you using?
Posted by: Sang Jin at April 10, 2007 02:26 PM