Homes That Were Not Mine

"Down by the lake you saw me and you knew I was waiting for you."



I don't remember my childhood. I don't remember anything, really. I see images sometimes. They play out like flickers of light against darkness.

When I was seven, I met a woman named Nicole. She was beautiful and fragile.

"Don't fall in love with a porcelain doll," her boyfriend told me when he was leaving, that time for good.

She worked at the clothing store down the street. She wanted to be an actress. I would visit her in her apartment whenever my mother let me. It was small, with tattered fabrics everywhere. I was a child who was good at pretending to be an adult. I'd trick her into talking to me about men. I'd wear her dresses and her high heels.

"There is never enough make up," she told me, as she straightened my hair.

Her eyelids were heavy with words and desire. Eyes piled up like hers, I looked like a painting. She took my picture and I saved it for later.

In her apartment, I wasn't a little girl. In that home that was not mine, I could try on the woman I wanted to be.

I'd leave her apartment, sad that the costumes she lent me were on the floor, hopeful I could wear them like my own, that I could be all grown-up again soon.




When I grew up, my best friend Alice moved just south of Yonge and Bloor. I found myself there several times a week.

Being an adult for the first time was thrilling. I worry I'll never feel like that, ever again.

It had wood floors and beautiful windows. It was huge for one eighteen year old. It decorated with pictures her sister had taken, but every part of it looked like Alice. I was sure parts of her had been swept across the floors, painted on the walls, washed into the counter tops.

The door was always unlocked. We'd sit on the black leather couch and talk about men. Life was slower, scored by teenage crises. We'd eat cold rolls on her floor. There were birthday parties, going away parties, parties for no reason.

That connection to my friends is something I've lost in the collection that's my life.

I miss the feeling in that home that was not mine. Everything that happened was funny. Nothing really mattered. I was weightless enough to fly. I was more comfortable in my own skin there than anywhere else in the world.

"All I ever want to do is listen to Girl Talk."

I still believe that that Katie and that Alice are living there, together, eating Cool-Whip until they're sick. It doesn't matter that she's half-way across the world. We're there. We're happy. Life is simple.

"Tell you what it is? Believe me bird girl, I've tried. There's no explaining."

The last time I was there, I danced without thinking. I haven't since.




Now, there is a room at Logan and Danforth that feels like home.

You have to walk up too many stairs to get to his door, feeling your way through darkness. It's messy and loud. There's a cat. She doesn't like me, I don't think.

We stay up late and the air heavy with bedroom philosophies. There, the sounds of my dreams always keep me awake.

Sometimes, home, as it's defined, is the last place you feel comfortable. You need other places, near and far, where there are no assumed roles, habits or expectations. You need the space. Desperate for a safe haven, you need the uneven colours of other's, to shape and shade your life.

"It's not that I feel like myself, it's that I feel myself becoming someone else."


You pass through places and places pass through you.