On Home

I’ve had many homes.

For a decade, I lived in a 3-story building in the Northern part of a big city nestled in the Middle East – built just before I was born.

Home was waking up on Friday mornings at my maternal grandparent’s house – to the soothing sounds of tea cups and saucers, my mom, aunts and grandmother discussing life, love, food, and the faint smell of an occasional cigarette they all shared in secret.

At summers, home had often been a swimming pool. A hot plate of fries, and our small bodies wrapped in plush towels. Home was once the hope of a pear tree on the other side of the swimming pool, where my cousins and I dropped seeds in the soil, with our little fingers sticky with fruit juice, water dripping from our swimsuits.

Home was once sleepovers with bursts of giggles echoing in the living room, and the comfort of the mismatched linens, big fluffy pillows, and nothing else.

One last swim, one last look at the pear tree that never grew, one last meal as a family, and my grandparents’ house was sold to a builder, but not before my 11 year old cousin grabbed a handful of the soil from the garden as memento.

One last time the scent of jasmines picked from the garden filled the whole home, and shortly after home had to be found on a different continent on the other side of the world.

I started a bedtime ritual the night we arrived in Canada: I began praying in Arabic. All day I didn’t understand what anyone said, and at night I slept in peace, repeating words in a language I didn’t speak.

During that first year, I obsessively repeated the words “I wish I was in Iran right now”. Anytime someone spoke to me in a language I didn’t understand, every time people laughed at a joke I didn’t get, any time there was a “foreign” movie on that everyone wanted to watch… and then every time I got bullied, wrote in my journal, washed my hands and brushed my hair. Every time I ate, slept, breathed. “I wish I was in Iran right now”.

Then on that first summer back, brushing my teeth in the familiar bathroom of my grandparents’ house on a Friday morning, I caught my 12 year-old self saying “I wish I was in Iran right now”.

Fast-forward a handful of homes, a few trips back to Iran, some education and a job, and I was 24 years old and married. Living in a “home” in the east side of the city, with a man who didn’t feel like home.

During the first couple of years of my marriage, I had this reoccurring nightmare where I was being asked who I was married to, and I couldn’t remember my husband’s name. I’d wake up in a panic, and just before my mind was fully awake, I’d search for a name – and whisper his name underneath my breath, with complete uncertainty.

I married him because he grew up on the same street as the house with the swimming pool. He was my hope in the pear tree reawakened. He was the handful of soil in a plastic bag. A piece of my past, but completely out of place.

I left that home.

Then home became a friend’s couch for a few days. Quick showers in the morning, a compact make-up bag filled with only the essentials, and overcoming my phobia of pet rats.

What’s it like to move back in with your parents after a divorce? It’s a 3 hour commute per day, but no rent. It’s delicious home-made foods but no independence. It’s more sleepovers on your friend’s couch. It’s expensive Uber rides after mediocre dates. It’s… time to live on my own… with a roommate.

Home is suddenly a tiny bedroom! It’s a quick walk to work and rent equals half of my income. It’s a little candle by my bedside table and no place to sit other than my single bed. It’s white, bare walls adorned only by a single framed poem from the cousin who planted the pear seeds with me. Her beautifully calligraphic words, dancing wildly on a splash of an orange color: ‘Tomorrow is another day” written in my mother tongue. Home is also cockroaches, and advice books on love and life laying around. It’s a roommate who packs me lunch and makes me tea when I’m sick. A friend who asks me if I have my umbrella before leaving the apartment.

This bedroom became the embodiment of my independence. For a very short period of time, it became a haven- where I found the courage to tell a man “you feel like home”. It became my sanctuary for writing. A place where I was told “it’s not you, it’s me” – at least twice! It became the loneliest place on earth, and the greatest refuge to heal my wounds and heartbreaks. It became a force of reflection and I healed in ways I didn’t believe I was broken. I wrote through the pain in my tiny home. Words and tears and excitement poured out of me late at night, and on early mornings and on lazy Sundays, and Wednesdays, and Thursdays and… and then it was all taken away from me.

I found safety, peace, and bliss in a human being who is nothing but patient with my wounds. And in the process of loving him, the concept of home slipped through my fingers. Sleepovers with a traveling make-up bag. Two toothbrushes, two loofah’s, two hairdryers. A mismatch of clothes: a pair of jeans, some earrings, a summer dress in a place that is not my own. A home to two dumb cats that I adore and a constant reminder of my partner’s past life and lovers, in boxes of stuff validating nothing but the transient nature of life and love itself. Hair ties under pillows of my single bed, and under his. I put my hair up in a bun when I’m hot, or tired, or sad, or excited, or relaxed, and the only bed-time ritual I practice nowadays is placing my hair tie under my pillow just before I sleep.

So I set imaginary boundaries and I buy groceries. I light candles and read the advice books on love, life and how to be a good creator. I check the cockroach traps and I do some dishes. I listen to podcasts about love and blast Iranian music and do my nails. And after months of having writer’s block, words slowly trickle out of me. They are painful and raw and so necessary.

“Hiraeth” is a feeling of homesickness for a home you can’t return to, or that never was.

I write about home, and without any distractions I mourn the loss of my grandparents and the loss of the pear tree that never was. I put my hair tie under my bed and ask the fairy for a home.