“Why don’t you decorate? You could do so much with this space.” It was an iteration I had come to expect when having visitors to the many homes I’d lived in, this time from the boy visiting me at the Toronto townhouse I shared with five other girls while I attended grad school. It was a beautiful three-storey brownstone — open-hearth fireplace, slanted ceilings, a rooftop balcony to flick cigarette butts from. It was the kind of home you associate with an upper-middle class family, begging to be furnished, preened with gold-framed mirrors, Persian rugs and heavy oak furniture. But for all its potential, I’d left my room untouched, the small blue loft serving as a dimly-lit landing pad rather than one of the cozy havens my friends had all produced in their own apartments.

“I’m here for ten months, tops. What’s the point?” I would say. This was my go-to response, contingent on the expiry of my lease, which more often than not meant a move to an entirely different city or province. Between the ages of 18 and 22, I’d moved ten times, and had fifteen different roommates. Some had morphed into quick and steadfast bonds, others never developed into anything more than a Facebook-friend acceptance. But with the camaraderie between me and my closest friends still came the pitfalls of cohabitation, the curdled milk leftover in the fridge or congealed eggs caked to a frying pan, masses of tangled hair clotting the shower walls or the damp wad of clothes left in the washer.

I grew up preparing for my departure. My childhood bedroom walls remained untouched by boy band posters, the bean bags or CD players that offset the Pepto Bismol pink of a teenage girl’s bedroom on television. It wasn’t that I didn’t decorate from a lack of interest for these homey, conventional things (I had a monthly subscription to CosmoGirl and Seventeen, and an unhealthy reverence towards Adam Levine). It was, rather, my apathy towards a space that wasn’t truly mine. I dreamt of a space unperturbed by Craigslist roommates and their partners, free of mouldy shower curtains and overflowing trash bins, one that felt like the refuge I yearned for. Reality was quick to check me. A symptom of the millennial malaise was that the combination of my student debt and sky-rocketing rental prices denied me the possibility of having a place to call my own. It was a cycle that left me ashamed for having to remind myself that at least I had a place to live.

After grad school, jobless and wishing to escape the crowded townhouse I’d come to share with my five roommates and their accompanying boyfriends, I moved back into my childhood room. My mother had not touched it since I had left for university, perhaps always sensing my return. The next day, I painted over the eggplant-purple walls (one of the few decorating decisions I’d made in my youth) with a creamy white. Then I painted one of the walls a forest green to mimic the Cabot Trail I’d hiked during my undergraduate years in small-town Nova Scotia. Gradually, I began to put up art I’d gathered throughout the years. Through trial and error, I learned how to keep a philodendron alive, and arranged leafy plants on every bare surface. I bought musky candles and sweet-smelling essential oils, sheer white curtains from bargain bins and second-hand books to use as makeshift nightstands. For the first time in my life, I cared for the space I lived in as if it belonged to me.

I didn’t know how long I’d be there. For the first time in my life, I didn’t have a plan for what was next; I simply didn’t know. I learned to ignore the practical side of my personality, the one asking me how I was going to pack my growing succulents collection into my battered luggage when I had to move again. I ignored the “for now” that trailed after every home I’d lived in since I was eighteen. I stopped neglecting my space out of the apprehension I felt knowing I’d have to one day, let it go. Instead, I embraced it as a reflection of the period of my life I was in, one I’d worked hard for. The places I’d lived had led me back to where I began. It wasn’t the bright, centrally-located studio apartment of my dreams. It wasn’t even in the city I wanted to live in. But I shifted the emphasis. This is my home, for now, and it’s mine.

Originally published in White Wall Review 42: Special Issue (2019)