One Month In: Missives From a New Home
Summer solstice reflections on grief, gratitude, radical acceptance, and sustainability histories
I wore my old home as a skin. It kept me cosy and comfortable and I often would go days without venturing outside, especially in the last 18 months of being in deep physical pain. Now I am moulting, shedding old patterns and routines and trying to adjust to life in a new home.
[If you’re new here, a few months ago we got an eviction from our landlord after six years in the same apartment, and a month ago we moved from one area of the city to another, an example of the precarious nature of renting.] Since my last newsletter, we had a fire in our old building, sold and donated what we could, packed up our things (more books than I realized), moved, unpacked our things, did many many errands, hosted. A few weeks ago I got sick with a terrible chest cold that I am still struggling with, my joint pain came back with intensity, and we celebrated Eid. In all of that, we’ve tried to fulfill our work and client responsibilities. It’s been a very intense period, and I both have reflections from what this time has been like, and also have felt too “in it” to have anything worthwhile and meaningful to share.
I’ve missed you and thought about you nearly every day. A month after the move, I’m finally back.
It’s been a strange time. I’ve been thinking of Khaled, the protagonist of Hisham Matar’s brilliant novel My Friends in which he lives in the same London apartment for thirty years, never expanding to more space, but content with the steadiness his life and small space provides him. There is nothing like being evicted to solidify one’s belief that housing is a human right not an investment strategy and that we need different housing models in this city, country and in our mental understandings of what home looks like. I have felt unmoored, struggling to feel grounded but conscious that this tiny grief is a miniscule droplet, not worth mentioning when I think about the torture, the endless destruction and bombs in Palestine, the continued genocide in Gaza.