The view from our Airbnb in Putney. This pigeon couple were frequent rooftop visitors and I think the same pair slept in a plant pot on the balcony a few times, too.
I hadn’t thought of home as somewhere that lived inside my body until I travelled to London last month. Straight away, my senses adjusted to the memory of the city I grew up in. Sensory input that once made up the backdrop of my life felt newly sharp and present: the smell of the air, an undefinable mix of pungent spring blossoms, gas and pollution; the voices of strangers, snatched conversations in a language I can follow, tube announcements like a prayer I once knew by heart. At the Airbnb in West London, in the borough in which I’d spent my adolescence, the top-floor heat stifled like it once did in our tiny flat in Crystal Palace. We poured ourselves glasses of tap water only to find it undrinkable, an inconvenient affliction that sounds pathetically snobbish, I know. We ordered Pizza Express, having not eaten a takeaway pizza for over two years. In my body, in its senses and thoughts, I felt home start to shift.
I wasn’t ready to be back in London. Any excitement I might have felt about seeing family and friends (and buying books, and going to Greggs, and Superdrug) was overshadowed by fear and anxiety. I was scared that the last few years would have changed London beyond recognition, but instead I found something that troubled me even more: a city that felt as though it hadn’t changed at all. Measures I’d practised throughout the pandemic in Sweden, a country that famously never locked down or had any truly impactful restrictions, felt antiquated and forgotten here. My removal from this place, the fact that I had not been there through the lockdowns and u-turns and wholesale state gaslighting, made me uneasy in my feelings. This may once have been somewhere on which I had the right to hold an opinion, but do I have that right still?
The trip went on. I spent a small fortune on disposable FFP2 masks, that warm, damp biosphere they form over your mouth and nose laying the groundwork for the mother of all breakouts that would be a problem for a version of myself that didn’t yet exist. On the tube, I recalled the core strength that once allowed me to traverse a moving carriage without holding on. London felt impossibly loud. The traffic as we walked down Putney High Street screeched and growled in a way that I once would have tolerated, if I’d noticed it at all. Now, I noticed everything. Birds–the pigeons that slept on the balcony of the Airbnb, the parakeets nesting in the chestnut trees stretching out over the Thames–were a bridge between two homes. In the street, I stopped and took pictures of unusual plants and flowers, observing how weeds found their way through cracks in the pavement. In the sky above us, flight after flight passed by, the noise like a soundtrack to a film I hadn’t seen for a very long time.
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I didn’t resist the urge to make the Airbnb feel like home during the six days we spent there. I organised my skincare products on the side of the bathroom sink, kept my bedside table tidy, did a load of laundry and filled the dishwasher, the hum of each machine steady and comforting, homely. I separated rubbish from recycling, winced every time I threw food waste into the bin in the absence of a composting system. I was not at home but home was in me. It manifested in the fragile routines I tried to honour, an antidote for just how out of place I felt despite wanting, so badly, to feel like I still belonged.
On the last night of the trip, I endured the screaming tube tracks to meet a friend in the queue outside the Brixton Academy to see a show we’d booked tickets for several months earlier. Large events still don’t feel safe to me, and I felt nervous to share space with so many people. From our sensible spot to the side and back of the venue, pain creeping into my lower back and legs, I remembered how my body used to feel here. I used to trust the hands of strangers to haul me over their heads as I crowd surfed, fearful of neither the solid floor beneath me nor the invisible germs (and, in those days, cigarette smoke) in the sweaty air around me. I felt weightless and free. Post-gig euphoria quickly dissipated as I made my way home, feeling suddenly visible and exposed in a country wounded by violence enacted on people with bodies like mine. I wouldn’t have thought twice about walking home in the dark before, I thought, as my Uber driver double checked that we’d reached the destination, insisting how important it was to see me to my door, especially at night.
As a means of coping with the uncertainty and horror brought on by the pandemic, my idea of home–of safety, security, joy–has been shrunk down, extending little further than the arbitrary borders of the house and its garden, and the handful of places we can reach within an hour’s drive. In the face of flight restrictions and not knowing when I’d next spend time with my family, I internalised home, kept it lodged inside me, a place I could find wherever I was. In London, I longed for the familiar flavours, sounds, sights and smells of Sweden. It was a longing I felt in my bones, even as I walked past my childhood home, or the flatshare I fell in love in, or the park I used to play in.
Can you feel at home in more than one place, or will one always have an edge over the others? What does that look like, that edge: is it tangible, edible? Does it move with the seasons, emboldened on particular days of celebration? The thick, warm air of a London summer will always feel like home. The first proper snow of a Swedish winter will always feel like home. The smooth surface of an Oyster card, the smell of the blackcurrant bush’s leaves under my fingers, the moment the lights go down and the band comes on stage at Brixton Academy. The moment you step off the plane and know where to go.
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