The search for home

Even before I moved away from my family at 20, I have always felt like an exile searching for a home.

I can chalk this feeling up to two things: moving residences being the one constant thing I had in my life, and always feeling like an isolated person, unable to relate to others beyond surface-level politeness.

The former feeds the latter mercilessly—I’ve realized I have been unable to place myself in a framework that involves accumulated memories with other people due to the fact I have never stayed in one place for more than a year or two since I was 15. This realization, involving 10 different households, four different cities, and four roommates, has left me longing for a place to call home. Or, if not a home with all its complicated concepts of belonging and comfort and stability, at the very least a place with longevity—one I could stay in for years. But even the future for this is bleak: I’m a college student bound for a few more years of roommates and rented space. For now, what I’m truly looking for are the little bubbles of home I seem to step into every now and then, and how I can define and experience the elusive feeling of home in the first place.

It’s been barely two weeks since I moved into a new residence: A two-bedroom condominium unit I share with two other college students. It’s nice. Big windows. Fully furnished. Huge mirrors. Well-lit. Still, I wake up in the middle of the night and find it an unfamiliar place. I want it to feel like home beyond the fact this is the place I collapse in after work. The lease is only for a year, so it’s hardly the place I could fantasize about setting down roots in, but I’ve found home in more temporary and unlikely places. I’ve convinced myself I can somehow find it here.

What is there to find? If we take longevity out of the considerations, what is left of the definition of home? Belonging is up there, along with comfort, safety, and love. I’ve found these multiple times in coffee shops, lovers, and friends. There’s always happiness in encountering that feeling of home, no matter how unlikely. Finding a home with lovers and friends is something I easily understood, as these are relations that provide comfort and care in whatever circumstance, but what continues to puzzle me are the coffee shops. It doesn’t even have to be a coffee shop—it just so happens every single one of them serves coffee. I’ve found a home in McDonald’s. In Jollibee. At the milk tea place a stone’s throw away from the wet market.

What I do during my stay is simple. I order my drink, pick a table, and spend the next few hours reading or journaling. I step out happier than ever.

My theory is that these are places where I can have a space to call my own, however briefly. It’s a place where I don’t have to put on any kind of pretense but simply melt into the number of customers enamored with their laptops and conversations. I have something I’ve bought that I can enjoy. I have the time to myself. I am home.

These places set up the expectation whenever I move into a new place, including this current unit. It was, once again, a place I could call my own, however briefly. I have time to myself. I can be at home.Except I don’t feel it. I’ve been telling myself I just need to get used to it, but the feeling nags at me nevertheless. I blame the ideal, fantastical paradise I’ve long imagined home to be. I also blame the detachment that comes with a shiny new lease. I don’t want to grow too familiar. I want to acknowledge that this is a place that I will also have to leave, with no delusions of permanence and stability.

What I’ve realized, then, is that to experience home requires a certain comfort for the inevitable ambiguities. It’s not just my life that’s uncertain, or nomadic—the world we live in is constantly in flux, and searching for a home or not, we always feel like there’s some sort of belonging or familiarity eluding us. I’ve dreamed of home as an ideal place I could just find and arrive at—the food warm, the lights on, a couch waiting for company. I wanted a home like that of my childhood: something simply given, for better or for worse. But true homes hide behind cultivation. A meal must be prepared for hours. The appropriate bulbs must be bought. The couch must squeeze into the front door and be pushed against a wall.

Homes involve care and cultivation, as simple as picking a table and a drink in the coffee shop, and going through arguments and arriving at compromises with our loved ones. We make choices that make our homes. Choices that yield love, comfort, safety, and longevity. None of them are simply found.

So I cook. I wipe down surfaces. I clean the floor. I invite friends over. I lie down on the couch and stare up at the ceiling in wonder. I journal on my bed. I create a routine that knows and learns about the ins and outs of these four walls. A few days ago, I bought an owl lamp through an app where you can find secondhand goods. I waited for it for an hour to arrive from Manila. It’s something I worked for, and something I can call my own. I switch it on every time I arrive from work.

I’m making myself at home.

Jewel Elizabeth Enrile, 22, is a comparative literature student at UP Diliman. She spends her time writing and reading in Quezon City.