Although we moved in this June, I still come home late and sleep on a mattress flanked by unpacked boxes.
I was away this summer so I haven’t had time to settle. The room’s too small and the bed’s too big, almost filling the entire space. The boxes can’t be unloaded until the bed goes.
At night, I curl away from the encroaching mess, listening to Vancouver’s rain. I don’t have much motivation to fix it. I’ll be somewhere else soon enough.
In the summer, I stayed with my cousins in Oahu where I grew up. My bed was an itchy mattress with an M&M blanket laid overtop. The springs would creak under my weight, while the green M&M looked on from the cotton fabric.
About a month in, I tried to stretch a fitted sheet over the bed’s edges, but it was a bit too short, so I weighed down one corner with a laptop and books. On the Fourth of July, I watched fireworks from the bedroom window, blooming like hibiscus.
In Oregon, where my parents live, I inherited another girl’s bed. She left it for me when I was 16, and her family moved out as we moved in. Her initials were still welded into the metal frame. When the lights turned off, I would stare at her glow-in-the-dark stars, faded against the ceiling.
As I’ve grown older and moved across the map, I’ve made connections to various landscapes and their people. I try to divide myself among those places but there’s always consequential dilution — a blur of shifting settings that never settle.
Nothing is fully familiar. Even the rooms I rest in feel somewhat foreign.
When I was little, living in a house my parents have since sold, I liked to stay up late. I liked windy nights. I thought I could hear waves beating the nearby shore or maybe it was just the crash of palm leaves.
It sounded like home in an irrefutable sense of the word. I don’t know where that is anymore.
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