How to Find and Lose a Home
Buy a house, not in a trendy neighborhood but a trendy-adjacent one where prices are better and that trends could turn toward. Haul in an apartment’s worth of furniture and chase each other from room to room talking about how the guest room could become a kid’s room, whether the office could fit a drawing table, how the basement could host parties, movie nights in, a table for puzzles. Lie on the carpet and roll toward one another, grip at each other’s waists, chests, faces. Slide your tongues into one another’s mouths and fumble with belts, buttons, underwear. Knock over the single lamp you’ve plugged in and laugh when it breaks because there are no shared walls, no one else you can bother.
Visit a thrift store, not Goodwill but the independent one near the race track run by a man named Tony who dives dumpsters, gathers trinkets, puts tags on them. Buy an oil painting of a basset hound, a paint-by-numbers you’ll sneak a ghost into, antique frames for honeymoon photos. Take it all home and lay it on the living room floor, smirk and laugh and shove one another when you disagree on how they should be arranged. Sneak kisses when your faces come close, take breaks to sip coffee on the floor of the front porch, beer if it’s past noon. Lean against one another and admire the gallery wall once it’s done, scroll your phones for a rug that will match it until an ad, a thought, a picture distracts you.
Plant a garden in the backyard, build boxes surrounded by chicken wire after your dog tramples it, eats the single crookneck squash. Wave to your neighbor while you water it, worry that you look like Cousin Eddie emptying his RV in Christmas Vacation. Make cookies to share because you want to be a good neighbor, because you want to be liked, because you want to be the wholesome type of people your neighbors crossed their fingers for when the last family moved out. Laugh even though it twists you inside when they tell you they don’t eat sweets but that their kids can give the cookies to their friends.
Get a puppy when your dog starts to age and you want to put off kids for another couple years. Pitch the rug you bought to match the gallery wall after the puppy chews the corners until they’re frayed, scratches and piss-stains the wood underneath so bad that it’ll need to be re-covered. Take the dogs outside in the middle of a snowstorm, make a time lapse of the four of you running laps around the shed, kicking up white dust, throwing snowballs while the dogs bark at you, protect you from one another. Lie down, swing your arms and legs to make snow angels. Turn toward one another and kiss until the dogs wedge their noses between your faces, lick your foreheads, leave drool to freeze across your cheeks.
Repaint the living room because the rug’s gone, replace the honeymoon photos in the gallery wall with prints downloaded from Etsy, pictures of animals from Target, a faux deer head. Repaint the dining room to match the whites, greys, of the living room, repaint the bathroom to match the similar-but-different whites, greys of the dining room. Replace the chandelier with the something geometric, half-completed cubes that intersect with one another, surround a cluster of Edison bulbs that light the room half as well as their predecessors but show up in pictures of houses the two of you see on Tumblr, Instagram—houses with built-in bookcases and bar carts, a headboard made of reclaimed barnwood. Seek out barnwood on craigslist, drive an hour and a half to see it, ask the old man where it came from. Make mental notes about the horses he kept, the way his daughter climbed bales of hay, how he kept the single board she’d carved her name into when she was eight.
Haul the barnwood home, lay it on the bedroom floor. Arrange it and rearrange it, rearrange it again when the painted parts don’t line up the way you’d like them to, when the way two boards lie atop one another exacerbates the way they’ve warped. Roll your eyes when you disagree on whether a square of white paint on one board should be placed along the outside or fall in the middle, agree to disagree even after you leave the room and come back and it’s been moved to the outside. Nail them together and spray them with a sealant because even though you like the old man’s stories, you don’t want them flaking from the boards and onto your pillow.
Fuck under the headboard and get pregnant. Haul the guestroom furniture to the attic, replace it with a crib, a changing table you registered for at Crate & Barrel. Paint the walls grey, not as dark as the grey in the living room or as light as the grey in the dining room, but a kind of in-between that complements the pastel knitted blankets your partner’s aunt asked her friends to make, pinks and yellows that remind you of the marshmallows in Lucky Charms even though the thought of cereal makes you want to vomit. Buy a rocker, also gray, and set it next to the crib. Tell the older dog no when he hops up in it, no again when he looks up at you with his eyes, not his head. Tell yourself you’re not the type of person who mistreats their dogs after their kid arrives. Ignore the voice that tells you that’s a lie, tell the dog, nevermind.
Order a king-sized bed from a site that sells stylish furniture made of particle board. Move the barnwood headboard to the attic next to the chandelier and the guest room bookshelves. Trip on the oil painting of a basset hound that you put away when the glass broke but you didn’t want to toss the picture itself, mutter goddammit, pick it up and wipe your fingers across it but especially across the sliver of your shoeprint in its eyes. Lick the end of your thumb, work the dirt and grime and muck into the canvas until its eyes are no longer white but tinged with brown. Prop it back against the wall, slide it up with your toe to help it not slide down again even though you know it will. Turn around before you go back downstairs, watch the sliver of light narrow over your accumulated shit until it disappears.
Buy eighteen, twenty-four, seventy-two outlet covers once the baby arrives, tension-mounted gates so you don’t screw into the door frames, locks that latch the cabinets together, protect the child from cookware. Place a bassinet in the living room, set the baby in it and sink into the couch, lean into one another. Get up, slide your hands under the baby and scoop it back into your arms, rest it on the crook of your elbow. Sit down, stare at its chest rising and falling in its swaddle, at the curve of its nose, at the flutter of its eyelashes. Hush the dog when he growls at a neighbor walking by, pet him with your foot when he lowers his head, curls up next to you.
Hire someone to refinish the floors when the baby starts crawling. Move the couch and bed and tables and chairs and rugs and bookshelves and record cabinet, the shoe rack and bar cart and dresser and crib and bassinet and toys and dog crates, all of it to the attic so the floors can be sanded. Pick a dark stain, not because it’s trendy but because it will hide scratches from dog nails and thrown toys, furniture dragged into place. Move it all back once the stain’s applied, the finish too, put everything where it was because even though the floor’s been sanded and it’s impossible for everything’s outlines and imprints to remain, they do. Accumulate shit, toys and books and dolls and puzzles gifted by friends. Fill the empty spaces of your home with it, a bouncer and playhouse and bins to store dolls and stuffies and a picnic basket with spaces in the top for a round plastic orange, a triangle wedge of watermelon, a perfectly squared piece of bread.
Buy a jogging stroller for walks around the neighborhood. Google the addresses of houses you walk by and compare their Zestimates to your own. Scroll the historical data and trace the line illustrating the upward trajectory of your home’s value since you updated it but also since the trendy burrito spot moved in a few blocks away, the Nordic-themed bakery opened across the street, the pool renovation at the city-owned park down the road began. Walk home and cook dinner and wash dishes and bathe the baby and rock the baby and hop from room to room to pick up toys and Cheerios and emptied applesauce packets, sweep up dog hair and wipe up drool, collapse onto opposite ends of the couch and sit in the glow of your phones. Google houses in the suburbs, pictures of carpeted floors and open concepts, fenced backyards with patios and swing sets and grass that looks like something from a golf course.
Act surprised when your partner brings up moving. Act more surprised when the realtor you hire compliments your home’s floors, the neutral walls, the geometric light fixture. Start to tell her about the reclaimed barnwood in the bedroom, the little girl’s name and the horses the old man kept, but pivot when you open the door and remember it’s not there. Nod when she tells you to remove the baby gates, paint the back deck, patch the concrete step that started crumbling that winter you chased the dogs and did snow angels. Try to remember how long ago that was, give up when it doesn’t come to you.
Remove the gates, paint the deck, patch the step. Move the bouncer and playhouse and bins full of dolls and stuffies and picnic baskets to the attic, set them in front of the oil painting of a basset hound so that it doesn’t slide down, get stepped on. Take the dogs on a walk when your realtor schedules an open house, try to hold hands but only brush fingers because the dogs pull so hard that they start choking themselves because these are their first walks in a year, and they’re thrilled. Smile at the baby when she laughs at them, smile at each other when you get a text that the open house is done, that you can go home, but smile biggest when the realtor tells you about the offers bidding against one another. Ignore a letter accompanying one because it’s not for as much money as the others and reading it will make you feel bad because you want more money. Accept the one for more money.
Pack your clothes into boxes, the baby’s toys into boxes, the dishes into boxes. Disassemble the crib, the changing table, the bed made of particle board. Put the hardware into plastic sandwich bags you label with Sharpie scribbled onto masking tape. Hire twentysomethings to load the boxes, the dining room table, the couch, the mattresses, the chest freezer—all of it into a truck. Drive it to a house in the suburbs, unload it into rooms that are different but maybe, someday, something similar, a kind of in-between.
Return alone for a final load. Grab an empty box from your trunk, stretch packing tape across its bottom, set it in front of the gallery wall and take the frames down one-by-one, stack them gently so that the corners of one don’t scratch the glass of another. Hook the faux deer’s antler into the handle and tape the box closed, step back. Study the outlines of the frames on the gray paint, dirt and oil and grime commemorating where each had been. Lick the tip of your thumb, rub it across one, rub harder when nothing happens, harder yet when you cause a smear that looks worse. Remember smiling and shoving and stealing kisses and scrub harder, spit at the wall and rub it in circles with the side of your fist, wipe it on your pants when the outline becomes a swathe of muck stretching out in an arc. Grab the paint from the basement, not the light grey for the dining room or the slightly darker grey for the baby’s room but the darkest grey for the living room, pour it into a box you’ve covered with a trash bag, drag the roller back and forth within it, back and forth across the wall, again and again, again and again, until they’re gone.
- How to Find and Lose a Home - August 5, 2026
* This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are producs of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
