How To Live in a Haunted House (Pt. 1)
"There's no place like home." And thank god for that.
I'm starting a new series this month. I'll be talking a lot about haunted houses, family ties, ghosts and liminal space. Conflicting notions of home & comfort. Things like that. I've been ruminating on these concepts for different reasons and in different ways. It's been a while since I've had something to say, so. As always, thank you for reading.What survival requires of you is ingenuity, flexibility and a streak of rebellion when the right conditions are met. Different strategies should be employed at different moments, contingent on the context. Over time, we grew to treat it like a game. We grew sensitive to the warning signs of danger—the difference between a tense silence and the simple absence of movement was always unmistakably clear—and inadvertently our personalities crystalized around our varied relationships and responses to different flavors of pain.
There’s very little that I remember about my childhood. When I was nine, we moved into the house that my family and I still live in today. Before that though, from ages four to eight, I and my family lived in a very infested two-bedroom apartment. I remember those years with more clarity than all the ones that followed. I recall the creaky wooden floors, the intimidation and pride that came with sleeping at the top of our brand new bunk bed, the summer blackout of ’05 and accompanying my mother to the store for batteries, watching civilians stand in the intersection and take turns directing traffic. After that year, it gets murky for a while. Despite owning a digital point-and-shoot camera that I was gifted for Christmas during eighth grade, I deliberately made a conscious choice to wipe most memories of my middle school years, which was a miserable time for me. My high school years were comparatively better, though life at home was not.
I never liked being home. I grew up always longing to be somewhere else, though I couldn’t exactly say where because I was chasing a feeling, not a particular sort of place. But I’d step into other people’s houses and sigh with envy at the peace and the neatness and the thoughtfulness of their decor, the way things just fit together. Even if it was all superficial, merely a sheer illusion, it was more than I had waiting for me back at the house we occupied. As a child, I used to take the long way home—doubling an hour commute into two—just to have a few extra uninterrupted little moments to myself. I clung desperately to that fleeting sense of sanctuary. Trains, bookstores, the bedrooms of my childhood friends and the internet were all sanctuaries I took solace in over the years because what alternative did I have? When “Home” for me was a site of stress and cacophony and loneliness and shrinking? My comfort could only be found once I was away. And this was affirmed by the relief that overcame me anytime I stepped out of the house. But once inside, I resumed my place amongst my siblings—my fellow ghostly inhabitants—as we resigned ourselves to haunting the house in which we lived and wilted.
Spare Change
Two years ago I got hired at my first “big girl” job, one where I felt like I finally made a livable salary worth taking pride in. The day I got the offer letter, I began daydreaming about saving up to move out into my own apartment. I thought about decorating. I fantasized about baking cakes and quiches, hosting friends for wine nights and lounging on the couch to read. I spoke to my mother about it and she discouraged me from renting to suggest I consider buying a house instead. You could get a two family place and rent out a floor, she suggested, offering to even help me with the down payment. We live in New York City. I balked at the idea of being a twenty-something landlord. I didn’t take her up on the offer. I just continued working.
In an effort to practice growing up and embracing some fiscal responsibility in the meantime, I attempted to teach myself how to budget and save for the first time in my life—I made an elaborate Excel sheet with formulas and conditional coloring. Quietly I understood I could cut back on spending if I didn’t order so much takeout—which would only be possible if we had a working fridge. At my house, we haven’t had a working refrigerator for the last three or four years. Maybe it’s even been five? I’ve truly lost count. We don’t have a working oven or dishwater either. Our kitchen is mostly just for show.
Right before it’d gotten fully unusable though, I’d been doing HelloFresh for a few months, in a previous effort to wean myself off daily Uber Eats. Thinking back to that era, to that time when I thought adulthood meant I should learn to cook, and despite my intimidation with the task, I had taken up this subscription and even found some joy in following a recipe and having all the stress removed from the process—I felt a pinch of self-pity. For all the ways in which I was failing at growing up in comparison to healthy, normal people. I couldn’t save, I couldn’t cook, I couldn’t leave.
Last month, for Mother’s Day, I attended a funeral with my mother in New Jersey and met some of her side of the family for the first time. The relative who had died was one of her first cousins, a woman I’d met a few times briefly, once for sure in that old apartment, and whom I had allegedly been partially named after. This cousin, twelve years my mother’s junior, had already been a great-gran before the age of 50. Her daughters and grandsons and nieces gave tear-stricken speeches at the funeral. She had died of diabetes, I learned. A disease which my mother had as well. I was witnessing firsthand the slow debilitating effect it was having on my mother’s body.
After the burial, we attended a “celebration of life,” a big family barbecue full of relatives of all ages, with every table’s centerpiece a different framed photo of the deceased. I marveled at the spectacle of family and again had that familiar sense of envy: clearly these were healthy, functional people with ties and intimate connections that went beyond any superficial familial titles, bonded by real love and effort.
Regardless of these being my own assumptions and speculations, it felt true enough. I tried to imagine my own funeral. This was only the third of my adulthood, and the first two had been in the Caribbean. I lacked a framework for how these sort of events usually went. Intimately, however, I understood that my parents would not have the competence for this level of planning or execution. I thought about all the times I’d dreamt of dying, up to and including just a week prior. Looking around at the 100 or so people in attendance, I couldn’t imagine an event of this nature being held in my honor without any involvement on my part. Like, who would tell my friends? Who would make the arrangements? I thought about how life insurance is voided if you die by your own hand. I sighed. Funerals are so expensive.
On our way home from the event, after a bittersweet Mother’s Day brunch the next morning, on the train ride back from Jersey, I made an offhand remark about how a month or two ago my own doctor had warned me I was pre-diabetic, tasking me with bringing my sugar levels down by the date of my next appointment. (I suspect I’ve been failing.) I told my mother that recently one of my sisters had admitted to receiving the same diagnosis from her doctor as well. My mother tried to chide me for all the takeout I ordered regularly. I agreed with her, but I reminded her that it would be easier to avoid doing so if we had a working refrigerator, if I could buy ingredients and be able to cook meals at home like normal people. She nodded, and got quiet. For the first time, I felt like she understood that slowly she was killing us.
By the end of May, she bought a fridge.
Sweet Home
The recent addition of this kitchen appliance coincides with the culmination of the months-long project that has been finalizing a three-way bedroom swap between myself, my first sister, and my youngest brother. For about a year, none of us have been sleeping in our desired bedroom. Our belongings have been scattered about, our clothes in bins and bags. It hasn’t felt much like home within the house. Less than usual at least, considering it never really felt like home to begin with. In the process of renovating, I’ve been fighting against that sense of defeat, the feeling of being a stranger in the place I live. I painted my bedroom walls myself. Pink walls, lavender trim, a border of hearts along the ceiling. Something to create the illusion that serenity and oasis are possible in a place I’ve only ever associated with chaos and strife and trauma. My mother, a hoarder, acquiesced to us wanting to discard and replace the old furniture, though at times she threw tantrums in protest. It felt like a small miracle.
I haven’t completed furnishing and decorating the space, but now that I’m 70% of the way done, I feel optimistic about how it will all eventually come together. At the same time, sometimes I look at what I’ve achieved and feel a shiver of embarrassment. I understand the wound I am trying to soothe through this mirage, the inner [outer] child I am tending to with these colors and motifs. I know it is a fool’s errand. A trick of the eye. But survival sometimes demands this sort of dishonesty, this elaborate game of pretend. A place to hide where I can’t be touched or seen. A clean slate that can’t be kept that way forever but is coveted nonetheless. Still, I am grateful when I close the door and lock it behind me, for the relief I experience now that I didn’t have before, that once seemed an impossibility within a place like this.
If I died, and you stood in the bedroom as I’ve designed it now, you could look around and almost know me.
