i guess words mean things

It's funny how words or phrases will enter and exit our daily vocabulary in ways we’d never expect. Nowadays everyone is suddenly an amateur epidemiologist, talking about ‘respiratory droplets’ and ‘flattening the curve.’ But the biggest change I’ve felt has been around a pretty simple word: ‘home’.

My mom and I lost our house last year. There’s a whole sordid tale, but the tl;dr version is that the house I grew up in, the one my mom was also raised in, had to be sold because of messy finances and old divorce papers. That house was our home. It was my home. Even when I was apartment-hopping in the city, in my mind I always had that singular, true home waiting for me.

I haven’t been able to refer to our new apartment as home. I always just say, “I’m gonna head back to the apartment.” If I want to mix things up I’ll say ‘domicile’ or maybe ‘habitat.’ I feel a twinge in my spirit any time I end up saying ‘home’ for the sake of brevity or clarity. My jaw aches when I force my mouth around this word that has always held infinitely more meaning than ‘the place where I dwell.’

I know all the corny little sayings. Home is where the heart is. Home is where the wifi automatically connects. Home is wherever I’m with you. (I actually made a small embroidery of that one for my mom last year before the shit hit the fan. She loves that song. The embroidery is hanging in our new kitchen, and it squeezes my heart every time I see it.) Pithy truisms don’t make pills any easier to swallow.

But social distancing has been like high-intensity interval training for this particularly stubborn muscle in my brain. Everyone is working from home.

Yeah I have an old macbook at home, but it should be able to run this software.

Let’s all grab books to take home.

I don’t have any toilet paper at home.

Are they sending you home early?

Being forced to stay in this fake home more often, and to mention it in every meaningless workplace conversation, has made me start to lean into the bite. I guess times of crisis tend to speed up certain processes of adjustment, or loosen weird emotional philosophies. Part of me is still convinced I’m just temporarily staying in a particularly personalized hotel room, but yes, I’m working from home. Also I really need to find toilet paper.