Limbo-Land

Or, why I’m having an existential crisis on holiday

We are on holiday at the moment. In Greece. It’s lovely: hot, blue skies. The most difficult decision is beach or pool, and what to read next.

Despite the loveliness however, I appear to be having some sort of internal meltdown.

“This last month, l've been travelling so much, going home for just about long enough to do laundry and repack my case. It's been so much fun, and I've spent time with so many of my favourite people, but tomorrow I'm going home and I'm going to be there all summer and the thought makes me giddy,” wrote Debora Robertson recently on her Substack.

“This may be controversial, but one of the best parts of travel is that week you get home and the appreciation you have for being back in your house. There's nothing better than drinking my coffee, sleeping in my bed with my favorite pillow, puttering around my house... soaking up the little life l've built for myself.

Adventures are great, but home is the best,” wrote Grace Atwood on hers.

I’m happy for them, really I am. I adore reading about Debora’s adventures in her French house, and I get exactly where Grace is coming from when she writes about the appreciation for your own home.

The trouble is that right now, I don’t have my own home. I am literally living out of a several suitcases. We moved out of our home in York a couple of weeks ago, having returned it to its bland, magnolia-walled rental state, spent a week with my Mum and Dad, and now we’re having a brief holiday before we get on a plane and move to DC. We have, in theory, a home there - an address; someone picked up the keys for us this week; I’ve been in touch with the lady who’s going to clean for us; we have furniture due to arrive when we arrive and our shipping shortly after that (hopefully).

But I have never seen this house in the flesh. It is currently empty. The bed I will sleep in when we live there is not my own; I don’t yet know what my preferred coffee will be; I don’t even have a washing machine to do my laundry as it’s broken (although will hopefully have been replaced by the time we get there). I don’t know where my pictures will hang on the walls, or what the air will smell like when I step out in the morning, or what the sounds will be like, or what my favourite little nook of the house will be.

It’s most discombobulating, and it’s making me feel utterly untethered, and a bit stressed, and a tiny bit down.

Because the thing is, I LOVE home. I love making a home - always have, from boarding school days where I would decorate whatever room I’d been assigned immediately, making it mine with pictures and small decorations and little tchotchkes, through a brief period of owning my own flat where I took down walls and turned it into my own grown-up space, through to our most recent rental home where I painted the sitting room walls Edward Bulmer’s Invisible Green and made the rank kitchen bearable with some Setting Plaster. I cart enormous amounts of stuff with me wherever I go - books and pictures and endless cushions that drive my husband crazy, but make whenever we are cosy and welcoming.

It was a very boring room but the Invisible Green made it quite cosy

All these things (or the most crucial of them) are currently in a shipping container halfway across the Atlantic, and I know that once they arrive and I place them I will feel tethered again. But in the meantime I feel stuck in a weird sort of limbo. I miss York desperately - not our house, which was functional and boring, but my life there and the friends I made and the way it felt real and purposeful and busy and fun. Last night I found myself noodling around on Rightmove hovering over houses for sale in the city and knowing exactly what living there would look like: what my path would be each morning to school, for a coffee, to the butcher.

I can’t allow myself to think about our actual home (the one that we own); the house we bought and renovated from top to bottom and lived in for one glorious year before having to move out of it (husband’s job) and rent it out. To a lovely family, but whose stuff in it suddenly made it feel not like my own any more (quite correctly) and who are now themselves moving on which means we need to find new tenants among this maelstrom of madness. The whole time we lived in York if I wanted to buy a piece of furniture, or a lamp, I would work out where it would go in our home home, which would accordingly direct whether I thought the item was worth it, or how much it was worth paying (why we ended up with crappy bookshelves but a nice coffee table), but with this next move even that is sort of fading away. I can’t even let myself imagine living there any more as I don’t know where that will be.

And so I find myself homesick for a home that doesn’t exist. Which is weird and strange and sad. I’m trying to sit with the feeling and work out what it is. For a place with my own pillows and coffee? For the people that make up a neighbourhood around your home? Or maybe just for something known. Right now, I know nothing. It’s exciting and terrifying and very unsettling. How strange life can be sometimes.