17. progress
baby steps
It’s been a while, hasn’t it?
What started as a couple of weeks’ break to spend time with my family, ended up turning into a long sabbatical induced by sickness, fatigue and a general desire to not get caught up in the hustle. But here I am, sitting on my new couch, finally comfortable in my own space and with a burning desire to write and write and write some more.
I am rejoicing in this newfound cosiness in my own home, an inexplicable want that I had since we moved into this house a few years ago. When I began living here, technically this place only belonged to Alex. He had finally found an apartment that he loved after spending months looking for shared accommodation that either didn’t like him or he didn’t like. We had no furniture – a mattress on the floor, a lamp on a vintage side table, a bookshelf half-filled with books never read. A peace lily on a pretty tiled stool was the most beautiful part of the house.
But somehow, this space had felt like home. More than the single-bed dorm room I lived in, overlooking the courtyard of the dorm master and rich, white people’s bungalows on the outskirts of the city.
Every piece of the first set of furniture that we had in this house was thrifted. Maybe ‘thirfted’ is pretentious. We got it all from a man whom we never met and who was leaving his Hamburg home for a new one in Amsterdam. He gave us our bed, our dusty pink couch, a couple of side tables and plants (which we failed to keep alive). He didn’t charge us any money and we only paid for the transport.
For the longest time, for reasons I cannot pinpoint, this home felt unfinished. And while I felt I was home, it also felt like it was not really my home. I felt incapable of making improvements to its state. I had neither the money nor the skills to make it look pretty.
When I lived in India, in a 1BHK apartment which I called mine, I rented all of the furniture. I had adorned the walls with posters that I liked from Sofar Sounds gigs. My mother had either picked the curtains and bedsheets and pillow covers for me or had helped me pick. It was my version of a home and leaving it was the biggest source of sorrow during my first two years here. I tried to recreate that comfort, that cosiness I felt in what I still call ‘my apartment’ in the house that I called home now. But something was always missing.
Maybe it was the fact that I lived with someone else now. Despite being the wonderfully clean and organised person that Alex is, he had his ideas of beauty and comfort which were quite distinctly different from mine.
Maybe it was the unease of not being in my own country, not knowing where to start.
Maybe it was the fact that I never learned to make a house into a home. Maybe I didn’t develop a taste of my own in aesthetics and collected furniture and decor that just looked pretty individually and never as a whole.
Almost one year into living here, we slowly started buying our own furniture – a little kitchen table here, a set of chairs there, a workspace here and a bookshelf there. With every small addition, the space between the front door and the long bedroom and living room windows started feeling like my own. Slowly over the years, we added more bookshelves, a television and a console to go with it, a dresser, a clothes rack and rugs strewn across the apartment. And now finally, a couch.
On odd days when the sun shines brightly through the Hamburg clouds, I click photos of the light reflecting off the tapestry in our bedroom. I marvel at the little mosaic of sunlight on the living room floor in front of the couch.
Sometimes, I sit on my bed and look at the bookshelf at the foot of it, with its 40 euro candles and collection of Phool incense and books that are still largely unread. And I am so grateful for having this home, for having created it so accidentally into a space that we both find comfort and peace in at the end of a long, tiring day at work.
I am telling you all of this because largely, I needed to hear this. To acknowledge and remember that we have come a long way from a mattress on the floor and a single closet with all our clothes stuffed in. We bought a couch this week and someone else may have bought something bigger. But we started slow. And we have made this beautiful, wood-floored, high-ceiling apartment into something of a work of art.
This is progress. For us. For me.
Until next time, enjoying the rare sun on my very comfy new couch,