Utimately, home is where the dirty dishes are
I went away to London for the summer.
I say 'away' although of course I mean 'home'. I went home. It was nice, for the most part.
Five weeks is a long time to be not-in-your-own-bed. And not the fun, 'I'm shagging my way through Europe' type, but rather, the type where you just feel a bit different, and not just because you can tell, by comparison that your bed might be A Bad Bed. Home is London, see, and for five weeks this summer, that was really true. I slept and rose most mornings in my sister's house in south London, and then I did things all around the city. I didn't leave the city of my birth once, contrary to my grand plans to visit Rome or Paris at least once. It turns out that when I am busy, I get lazy. I wanted London, and London got me full-time, for a while.
The real thing is that home is New York too, now. I am at home in the city in the small ways — I have just about got the knack of route planning home from most parts of the city, even on a disrupted weekend service. I can successfully hail yellow cabs now, even though I much prefer Lyft. In London, I grumbled elegantly and somewhat self-consciously at how everything just... shuts down on a Sunday night, even though a part of me will forever love the impregnable fastidiousness of the Sunday trading laws, and hope they never change. And I am also at home int the big ways. I pay tax. I have a library card. The super in the building next door greets me every morning with a never knowingly encouraged "Hey, morning, baby!" as I walk to the subway station. New York is home. It's where I work, where I wrote my first play, where I Tinder. It is where my plants are.
I'm home in Brooklyn now, working at a newly assembled desk, in a nightgown I bought in east London. Soon I will sleep in my not so comfortable bed. And when I wake up, I'll be in Brooklyn, still. And then I will try to book a ticket hime to London for Christmas.
I like having two homes.
I don't normally do this, but! I would like to make a recommendation. It's a book called This Really Isn't About You, by one of my fave writers, Jean Hannah Edelstein. If you like thoughtful, funny, incredibly human writing about life and love and family and young women in cities, I cannot push this into your hands fast enough. I normally don't gravitate towards memoir, but well, Jean is special and this is so quiet that you don't even know it's cut you until you feel wetness (joy! and pain! sunshine! and rain!) on your face. I devoured it and felt full. Wow. Also, subscribe to her newsletter, Thread.
It's available on Amazon, of course (sigh, what isn't?), but also in other places, like bookshops that haven't floated putting their employees in cages. Yet. At the very least, why not borrow it from your local library? Jean'll get a tiny cut. It all adds up!