About ten years ago, I went through a difficult period in which I couldn’t see a future; I couldn’t dream. I tried to imagine one, five, ten years into the distance and saw blackness, absence, nothing. It wasn’t that bad things were happening, but that I couldn’t see anything at all.
I tried the same with friends of mine and could see a future for each one of them. I concluded that nothing was wrong with my imagination, but that something was wrong with my own thoughts about myself.
This is why I will always tell people that therapy changed my life. Go see a therapist – they are good people.
One of the things on my mind back then was one day, eventually, starting a family. Ten years has gone by faster than I ever would have thought and when I consider myself and two friends around me at that time, I can only throw back my head and laugh.
At the time, all of us were unsuccessfully dating. Now, we are engaged, partnered, married. None of us were ready for the children we all hoped would be somewhere in the future. Now, we are all preparing for babies who will arrive this year.
Ten years ago, I saw these futures for my friends though I couldn’t see one for myself. Today, I am holding hands with these friends across time and space; the future couldn’t look more different.
Whenever I dream of “home” I dream of the old house, specifically the kitchen, which was always my favourite room.
I remember the walls yellow and later orange-red, the cherry wood table and matching chairs stained with a blue accent that I knew was beautiful long before I was old enough to develop taste in furniture. I wonder if there are still math problems visible on the soft wood when the sun shines just right. I wonder if they can still be felt when you rub your finger along a seemingly smooth surface. It was always bright in the kitchen, even when it was dark outside, and I remember the upheaval of removing one pantry to build a desk and replacing the floor that children and toys had long treated too harshly.
The kitchen was the geographic centre of the old house, the first room you saw from the front door, and the first room you entered after bursting through the mudroom door in playclothes, smelling of sun and sweat or peeling off layers of snowpants and gloves. We did our homework at the kitchen table, ate dinner as a family, played board games, sat around to share the worst news and the best news. Almost every photo that we have from a birthday or holiday was taken in the kitchen. Every gathering with friends and extended family started and ended in the kitchen.
We always had a radio there and we listened to talk radio in the morning and music in the afternoon. Sometimes the bird was out on the island when we got home from school, and late in the evenings, the dog turned the island into a race track. The kitchen was the part of the house we lived in, and it’s the room I picture when I think about growing up.
I don’t remember much from my dream last night, but I was back in the old house, back in the old kitchen. I haven’t been inside since I moved to Malaysia nine years ago, shortly after which my parents sold the house and moved across town. I drove by once and soon I’ll drive by again to show it to someone who has only seen it through Street View on Google Maps. The photo there is of a house where I still lived, the car in the driveway not yet my brother’s. I wonder what it looks like now. I wonder what parts of it are best-loved now.
The kitchen is the room I always want to see when I visit a home for the first time. That’s the room I want to be in, the room where I feel most invited and most comfortable. Guests are shown first to other spaces, but kitchen parties are always the best parties. Time in someone’s kitchen is intimate, cozy, personal, and I think there’s some love there, too. It’s in the kitchen where we work alongside one another, where we see what’s not so tidy, where we take raw ingredients and make them into something magical.
It’s no surprise that the kitchen in my parents’ “new” house is the room I’ve spent the most time, the room I like best. It’s the first room you see from the side door, which is the only door they use, and it’s the room that contains the daily traces of people – reading materials left on the counter, coffee cups out ready for use, recipes tucked under the fruit bowl.
Last night I dreamed of the old house, which is always the case when I dream of “home”. My dream started and ended in the kitchen, and as always, it took me right back.
I dreamed I couldn’t find you, even though I knew exactly where I’d left you and you told me where you’d be. I dreamed I couldn’t find you, even though I looked under every rock and behind every tree in all of those places, right where you should have been.
Sometimes I think you don’t want to be found, that you take a moment off alone just to be alone. I understand because I do that, too, or I take the road less travelled, the unbeaten path, just to see where it will go and to be away for a while. Usually, I find, I haven’t been missed. I like the solitude of airplanes because I can step away without explanation.
It didn’t make sense in my dream that I couldn’t find you, and my dream self knew it. So I looked around, bemused. You were there, somewhere, because you said you’d be.
Instead I closed my eyes and waited.
And when I opened them again, you were right in front of me.
Photos, travels, musings, and ideas on education by someone trying to make the world a better and more peaceful place
By Rebecca Michelle 