The Home I Would Choose For Myself

I was walking to visit a friend so we could watch The Librarians together and drink every time they said “ley lines,” and I stopped, as in my body stopped without checking in with my brain first, in front of this window.

This is the home I would choose for myself.

I’m making this distinction because, when I wrote about why I wasn’t a homeowner earlier this week, I wrote about the idea of making a home with someone else — and implied, through my dating history, that whether I ended up in a rammed earth home or a Beverly Hills apartment largely depended on whom I ended up partnering with, in the end.

But this room? This is mine. This is my home without anyone else’s taste or involvement.

It’s a little aspirational, in that the furniture is all a bit nicer than what I currently have, but what struck me about this room was how much it resembled my current apartment. The bed with the low headboard and the dark blue comforter, set behind the small, uncluttered desk. The chocolate-brown sofa to the side, the way it was when I had my apartment in DC and had enough room for a chocolate-brown sofa. (The sofa might actually be gray. I should have paid more attention before I took the photograph.)

I’m stuck, now that I’ve seen this room, on what it might actually take to create it. Right now it’s in the front window of Inform Interiors, and I can tell as soon as I visit the Inform Interiors website that I am not going to be able to afford any of their furniture, primarily because none of the images they display come with any prices. They are the type of furniture shop — probably interior design showroom is more appropriate — that literally throws launch parties for chairs.

I am very tempted to go to this launch party for a chair. I’ve been to launch parties for books and albums, so why not? There’s a weird sense of frisson about it, like I need to go be inside this space that looks like the inside of my soul. I know that what will actually happen is that I will show up, eat some free cheese, stand around and wonder if anyone can tell that my dress came from a thrift store, feel too nervous to talk to anyone, listen to someone else introduce a chair, and leave.

We get stuck, in both our financial and personal lives, thinking that we don’t really get to choose. That we should be lucky to have what we have, and happy with it as well. I believe in that. I believe that you get what you get and you don’t get upset. Part of what makes my life work is that I can say “well… okay!” to just about whatever happens.

But thinking that I could choose this home, now, or someday — well, I’ve got the debt I’m working to pay off, and a career to build, and I don’t really want to think about the cost of first and last month’s rent and security deposit and moving my furniture and buying a chocolate-brown sofa. It can’t be what I chase after, right now. What I’m already chasing is more important. I can still be happy, in my placeholder home.

I mean, of course I’m going to go to that chair launch. I’m just enough of a practical romantic to think I could solve the problems of dating and home aesthetic simultaneously by, you know, meeting my future husband at a chair launch. (You can’t go through life thinking that way, and yet you have to go through life thinking that way, the same way that you think, every time you submit an online job application, that this time it’ll work out.)

And then I’ll come back to my tiny apartment with its thrifted desk and cot-frame bed, and it will be enough that this other home exists somewhere, an idea of home both in my mind and in an interior design showroom, waiting until I’m ready for it.

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