Four Walls

On a warm May evening, I find myself researching wall paint colours and tile patterns. Since my husband and I decided to buy a flat a few months ago, days have blended into nights amid a whirlwind of emotions. The first time we ended up in this flat was out of sheer curiosity, never intending on buying it or even looking at it seriously, but the moment that door opened, it was quite literally impossible to step back. We felt giddy with hope at the potential of this place. That night as we talked of it, weighed the pros and cons (the pros outshining the cons due to the overwhelming fact that we almost instantly fell in love with it), I thought of how home has come in different shapes forms over the years. The glimmering home of my childhood, now seen only with the bright sheen of nostalgia. Boisterous school classrooms. My hostel room at college, remembered with a tornado of mixed emotions, with its jagged edges and barbed wires. My first home living alone, which became my sanctuary, the place where I learnt to love myself. And then, I finally felt like I found the warmth and joy of home in a person. 

In all the houses of people I have been to, quite a few have caught my eye as exceptional. Not for being the grandest, but for wordlessly introducing me to the people living in them. A home with little clefs and quaver notes etched into the ceilings; one with watercolour paintings on every inch of the walls; another with tiny planters adorning every room, blossoming with flowers of a hundred colours. I imagine that to these people, setting foot into their home must feel like a gentle embrace every time.

It reminds me of Nora Ephron's "Moving On, A Love Story", which I read a couple of years ago, in which she writes of herself being deliriously in love with her apartment in the Apthorp. I happened upon that article when I was myself falling in love with my own home. Living alone for the first time, albeit with my own doubts and trepidation, truly changed me. I taught myself to love and enjoy my own company, I filled that home to the brim with things that screamed my name, on the walls I stuck posters carrying my favourite songs, lines from my favourite books and drawings from my favourite movies. I put up photos of my friends on the fridge with little magnets and covered the window railings and sills with plants in little white pots. And in all those bits of myself, I saw a little of the Nora Ephron who fell in love with her house.  

Now I am at the precipice of once again falling in love with a new set of four walls. And so I string together on a golden thread a long line of wonderful adjectives for a future within them. It will be a place full of books and music and photographs, flowing with unrestrained laughter and wild chatter and lots of love. And with any luck, a little bit of magic.