i’m in a vessel, i am a vessel

“I wonder if I’ll ever be able to have what I like or if my tastes are too various to be sustained by one of anything.” -Eve Babitz

Colorado is “home” as I knew it, a small city northeast. I remember home feeling extremely imprisoning from a very young age and I think I’ve always had it in me to leave. It was never a question. I think back often on who I was as a child and how I viewed the world and strangely enough I think it’s very similar to now. There’s always been a bittersweet taste to life. I do think that I had a pretty broad perspective and there’s no real reason why. I was sheltered for the most part and was not heavily influenced by anything, unlike many upbringings. I think there was almost more of an indifference in being raised as a consequence to fear and an unstable home.

I do love my family, I do love my story so far. I used to not understand how it was fair. How certain things that people feel was fair, and why certain people could drink themselves to a place of not feeling, why certain people had to be around that. And why it was okay that all I knew was heartbreak at home. And for that matter, why so much of the world has so much heartbreak in their home. The older you get the more you’re told that in comparison your life is really good. I believe sometimes people don’t get to be told that they can feel whatever they want about things, but then take responsibility for it after they do feel those things. I think when you let yourself see yourself in these feelings, these moments, they can mean everything and they can actually help heal.

I have extremely vivid feelings and sensory memories from my life, from when I was a kid to my first few years in LA, I think it’s a gift. I think everyone has the capacity to do this but, again, I’m not sure how much liberty people take with that.

Home can be defined as a place where one resides. A word closely related to home is origin, and the definition of origin is the point or place where something begins, arises, or is derived. There’s a song I listened to the other night while I was driving on the freeway called Cancion Mixteca, it was a cover by Harry Dean Stanton. The lyrics translated to English are:

“How far I am from the ground where I was born!

Immense nostalgia invades my thoughts

Seeing me so lonely and sad like a leaf in the wind.

I would like to cry, I would like to die of feeling.

O land of the Sun!

Sigh to see you.

“It’s a blues song. Homesick. I say when you’re truly at home, there’s no more suffering. No more leaf on the wind, no more crying.”

In daily life I think a lot about the people around me. I think a lot about where they’re going, where they came from, what they just stepped out of personally to come into publicly. This person sitting across from me on the J train on the way into Manhattan looking out the window. Is their home in Brooklyn? Did they wake up happy? Do they like their job? I was in the car with my friend the other evening in New York, on one of the bridges looking at all of the life in the buildings. All of the square yellow windows in concrete boxes stacked on top of each other all filled with thousands and thousands of stories, and the energy that fills these lifeless structures and makes them ground for the most interesting things to happen ever in those exact moments never to happen again.

I wonder if people had ever walked by my home when I was a kid and wondered what went on inside and in the lives of the four people residing in it.

Do we have an endless number of homes throughout or lives? Do some people have two and some end up never finding it? Is homesickness the same thing as longing in general?

The day I left Colorado to move to California I remember extremely vividly. I was at my Nana’s, my sweet Nana and Pampa’s house with my mom where I really felt my mom’s sadness about me leaving. She asked me while tearing up, “Are you sure you want to go?”

No matter how much I had known for my whole life that I wanted to leave home, it was one of the most difficult things for me to do and I felt my heart stay behind for a long time.

I moved to California, first to San Diego to stay with my aunt. Because I had no money. Before that - I went to one year of college in my hometown and became extremely depressed, I was in an extremely dark place for a year and it go to a point where it was really quite bleak. But that’s for another time.

I cut my bangs, I went to Paris for a month with my graduation money, then decided I was moving to California. Again, cut to having no money and no clue how to make it work. Nineteen years old was my beginning.

I stayed with my aunt for about five months and commuted to LA whenever I could, to shoot, to meet people, to just be in LA. I was obsessed with it and immediately knew this place was my home. It was for me, made for me. It was somewhat of an awakening, very personal to where I think I began to understand that life was more than what you’re birthed into. And that I really had the right to make it so.

The angst to get to Los Angeles was the most real and most painful, inspiring, and motivating feeling I have ever felt. I was so close and so far away at the same time sort of an outsider looking in. I shared a bed with my eight year old cousin for five months, worked at American Eagle part time, babysat a newborn who cried for the entire six hour shifts every single time I’d watch it all in order to get to LA as soon as possible. I refused to quit because trying to find a new job meant less time making money. Five months later I moved in with my friend Morgan and started paying her some rent and sharing her bed with her for a few months, until I then moved in with my first real love, while in transition to move into my first place where I rented the dining room in a quaint little one bedroom off of Lucile in Silver Lake. Then signed my first lease on an apartment in Thai Town.

I still selfishly think LA is made for me. It’s still my home. And now I’ve got a new home on the east coast.

I’d like to know what others think of home and what home is to them, where they consider home and what makes it so. It’s our origin, where we leave everyday or where we left years ago.