Dear friend,
The other day, I got out my keys to open my front door. It took me three tries—not because I’m uncoordinated, but because of the janitor’s delight that is my current key ring. Keys to more than one old apartment, spares for homes that friends have since left, one to a store that doesn’t exist anymore. I can’t tell if it’s ritual, or homage, or childish wish. Maybe it’ll come back; maybe this is how to honor it. Ghosts of all the places, and people, I’ve been before.
It’s been about six months since I moved into a new apartment. The first space I’ve been able to truly settle into in a long time. I’m used to a more haphazard flavor of home: thumbtacks, tape, hasty windowsill altars. A much less purposeful Mary Poppins: whenever and wherever I dropped my bags, I had months, maybe a year, then the wind would shift and I was off again. And so it’s satisfying, and strange, to have drilled real holes into these walls and hung art I love; to have chosen new furniture, rather than deposit my hand-me-downs; to begin to build, even if it turns out to be false, something that feels solid.
I’ve been thinking about the 2000 film Chocolat. The premise: On a mythic northern wind, a nomadic woman named Vianne blows into a small, very Catholic village in southern France with her daughter, Anouk. Mother and daughter carry only what they can fit into their hand luggage. One of their precious bits of cargo is a dark, stout urn containing the ashes of Vianne’s mother, an Indigenous South American healer who began their family’s wandering.
I wasn’t raised by a single mother, and at Anouk’s age I had more than a suitcase of possessions. But I was a kid of divorce, which meant that for the better part of a decade, I shuttled back and forth between my parents’ houses every day, feet barely touching ground. Every day? people used to ask me, flabbergasted. It didn’t strike me as strange. My sister and I suddenly had two of everything, one room we shared and another to ourselves. (Maybe it should have felt like freedom.) My parents stayed in the same city so we could keep our school, our friends, our habits. (Maybe it should have felt like familiarity.) Certain objects never left my schoolbag: a tiny figurine, a bracelet, a book that wasn’t for classes. Reminders to myself that I was still solid. (Most of the time, it felt like fragmenting.)
A used-to-be-friend would bring teabags with her every time she traveled, including when she came to visit me. I used to tease her about it. But at some point in the Pandemic Era, without realizing its significance, I started doing the same thing on any overnight trip. Rooibos and Earl Grey, tucked into a Ziploc.
Another friend is writing a book. She once described her audience as “everyone who feels ever so slightly out of place in every home they try to inhabit.” Is it any surprise that she knows the best places to eat everywhere I meet her? That I rarely find her without a notebook at hand?
Anytime I travel, I carry a stone or two, depending on my mood. Quartz from my grandmother for protection. Amethyst from a cross-country friend for calm. On longer trips, I bring a tarot deck, a metal-tinned candle, a favorite necklace.
We carry our homes around with us. In movement—and discomfort—you learn what keeps you still. You learn how to be still anywhere.
When I moved in last fall, I unpacked boxes that had sat untouched in storage, film of grime, for two years. At one point, I was unwrapping beloved mugs, crowing as each one emerged, yelling their stories to my partner in the other room. I unraveled a long crumple of greyed paper to find two succulent plants hand-shaped in clay. One larger and bluish, one smaller and green. Both missing a leaf apiece — chipped in transit, during one of the three-four-five moves before this one. My heart dropped, ribs instantly hollow.
I must have stood there for a solid thirty seconds, plant in hand. Quiet so long that my partner came in to see what was wrong. I explained to him they were a gift from someone I don’t speak to anymore. He nodded, said nothing, knowing. I picked up the smaller one, showed it to him. “This one rattles,” I said, trying for a smile, the shape wrong over my bare teeth. I shook it gently, and we listened to the clay marble rolling inside its ceramic body. Sound both sharp and round, scrape of earth on fired earth. I tried not to let show that it sliced open a few stitches on a wound I keep trying to close.
I have, as you might guess, a habit of hanging onto things long past their lifetimes. Fruit going brown on the counter. High school notebooks in the basement. We do this a lot, as humans, don’t we? We want things to last. Nights, seasons, meals, relationships. We’re told that change is constant—but not all of us know how to be changeable.
I am going to spoil the ending of Chocolat for you—partly because it's twenty-odd years old, and partly because you may understandably not watch it (see “Parting notes”). After much drama, Vianne decides it’s time to leave the town. She wrestles a struggling, screaming Anouk into her traveling cloak and starts to maneuver them both down their apartment stairs—and her mother’s urn tumbles from her bag and shatters on the steps. Ashes fog the air; Vianne is wordlessly devastated. Anouk, horrified, kneels to start sweeping up the ashes. It’s a heart-wrenching moment, and it would be easy to expect Vianne to roar out of town in fury. But instead—she hears motion downstairs, walks into her kitchen to see the community she has built bustling around. Showing her they care. So—she stays. And when the northern wind next blows, she lets fly the rest of her mother’s ashes into the swirling air. Taking leave and taking root at once.
The ceramic plants sat on my kitchen table for months. One day, as I came in to make tea one morning, something in my ribcage cracked and sighed at the sight of them. I picked them up, as gently as picking up kittens, and put them in the hall closet. I haven’t decided what to do with them beyond that, yet—but I do breathe easier when I turn the kettle on in the morning.
Since the new year began, I’ve also donated a bag of clothes that are more souvenir than style. I’ve given away untouched gifts and tossed screws to furniture I’ve long since left on a curb. I’m even thinking about getting rid of a few of those now-useless keys. (For now, like the plants, they stay. These things take time.)
I have gotten used to clinging to everything with my bitten fingernails, only letting it go after fighting so hard to keep it that I’m exhausted. Making a space that feels like you—and sharing that space with someone you love—means making more choices out of curiosity, or excitement, rather than fear.
You make space for some things by loosening your grasp on others.
Parting notes—
In the interest of being informed as you make viewing choices, please note that while some themes within Chocolat still resonate with me, it is not an unproblematic film: Johnny Depp, who was found guilty of domestic abuse in 2020, plays a leading role.
The friend I mention who’s writing a book is Sam Chong. Follow her on Twitter for updates—I have read multiple manuscript drafts and can say it’s dark, clever, heartbreaking, and magical!
I desperately need a new keychain/keyring. (My current one says “Mom’s Taxi”—I don’t even have a license.) If you know of any cute ones, preferably from a small business, feel free to reply and recommend!