Making a home

I remember the blank walls. The mismatched art to give the semblance of life.
The bare shelves. Empty cupboards.
All white and blank and bare and unlived in.

I look around now at the dinosaur on the shelf, the DVDs fighting for space in the bookcase, the candles and the photographs and the memories. 

What can you know about us from looking around our living room?

The Liverpool shirt on the wall, the boxsets piled up on the window ledge, the medals hung on each curtain hook, the biscuit cushions, the Rubix cube tissue box. The James Bond prints in the kitchen that have become some commonplace that I don't even notice them.

The time the whole place came to life when we put photos up, that suddenly it felt ours. It felt like home.

I've never moved house before. Not really. Only from student flat to student house to student flat. Nowhere that I knew I was going to live in for more than a few months without those huge, stretching university breaks at home in between.

Today we have a viewing of our flat. 

Soon this will be someone else's home. Their photos on the wall. Their candles, their prints, their spare bedding that they hate because their nice bedding is in the wash. Their toothpaste smears, their cluttered bedside tables, their DVDs and books in the shelves.

They'll laugh at the way the neighbours always seem to stare straight through into our living room. They'll complain about the cold and take months to learn how the storage heaters work. They'll battle with the broken drawer in the living room. They'll be woken up by the whistling boiler at 2am.

I know I should be ready, but I'm not. I know I should be excited for our house - our actual house, with a garden and more than 4 rooms and a study and a dining room - and I am, but this has felt more like home than anywhere except my family home, and I'm just not quite ready to let go. This was our first home. The first place our tastes were forced to collide, the place where my nail polishes sit next to Phil's PS4. Where our DVDs have merged to the point that we don't know which belong to who. Where it didn't matter because everything became "ours."

And soon this will be someone else's home. Their memories. Their lives. Their tastes.

And I'm not quite ready to let go.