You’ll be at the deli in no time, he said. 

This was a line from the man who helped me move flats in March. I don’t remember his name - I got his phone number from my friend Lucy and he barely charged me for the job. After tucking my plants and suitcases into the back of his van, I buckled in next to him in the front seat and we slowly drove west to continue living in East. 

I grew up here, you’ll like it. Like right down there. You fit right in. That other place was weird, wasn’t it? Very desolate in appearance, how did you end up there?

He said this all at once garbled sentence, then took a big sip of his coffee. Within 30 minutes, I had all my belongings from the front of my old flat in Stratford into a new flat down the road from Haggerston station. I didn’t have much to move, but I could see the shock in his eyes when I had brought my belongings downstairs, outside of my old place into the street, ready to loaded the van as quickly as possible, my old flatmate watching from her window.

According to Britannica, a house refers to a ‘building in which someone lives. In contrast, a home can refer either to a building or to any location that a person thinks of as the place where one lives and that belongs to them.’

In September 2022 I got my first tattoo of a little house drawn with a single line. A few weeks before, I had seen a design online similar to the one that now sits on the back of my right arm, and it suddenly made sense to me. I have different homes in different places, I explained after getting it. I live a sentimental existence, one threaded between the worn in spot on my Mom’s couch that saw me read every morning for my college years, to the patch of olive trees along Na Petar that guided me to the sea as a child, to the tiny freckles that have started to appear on my cheeks this summer. I carry my home around with me, I guess. I think of the house on the back of my arm as a home of its own, a belonging within myself, within a space, a space of my own.

A week before this, I had moved to Stratford. As a firm believer in signs, often picking up heads-up pennies from the floor for good luck, I thought the connection between the humble street I grew up on, Stratford Drive, to moving east to London’s Stratford by sheer luck was a sign. I moved into a beautiful, albeit strange, new development along a canal, the floor to ceiling windows and lack of art on the walls making it feel modern, adult, like I was moving in a new direction, maybe even the ‘right’ one. The place felt huge, my suitcases able to fit in a storage locker instead of wedged between piles of music, my clothes barely filling the wardrobe, my books not needing to live in stacks on my floors but in a bookshelf in the living room. But something about this place told me it would never feel like home. 

Moving to Stratford was my first time living with other people, people besides my brother who was in the next room to me and my parents who were down the hall. My year-ish of living in a dorm until July 2022 felt liberating, frustrating at times but not because I didn’t like living alone. I loved it. My space was tiny but completely customizable - I opted to change the books on my bedside table often, to turn my plants and buy plates I liked, building a collection of things to cook for one, to be as one. Moments of sheer bliss were felt here, some of the first I felt at home in my own company, dancing around my room after failed dates and artist applications, trekking back from Electric Coffee with croissants while deeply hungover, letting myself fall in love with ingredients and passages of literature and practicing in the midst of what I didn’t realize at the time to be huge life upheaval - moving across the world by myself, forced to stand on my own feet in the wake of a global pandemic and the relationship I thought I knew ending quickly over text, the beginnings of knowing who this person was, the parts of Stratford Drive that carried themselves to Poljana and Petrčane and back and through the brief stints of travel, trains and buses and planes and walking down roads both new and unfamiliar, but ultimately to the new life I was building, the home I carried within myself.

In telling people about this tattoo, I told them about where I was, having left my things in suitcases tucked underneath a keyboard at my friend Oscar and Joanna’s flat over the summer, stressfully trying to find somewhere new to live, to now being in what felt like an idyllic flat.

So random, right! I found it on Facebook, the curtains are so big, did I show you the hammock?

How are your flatmates? Do you get on? What do they do?

Yeah, they’re fine. Not really elaborating on the strangeness that lived within the walls, the knowledge I had that something was not right, but that I couldn’t put my finger on, the disdain when trying to put things on the walls or the comments about the foods I ate, the feeling that this place - though my name on the contract and most of the bills, splitting expenses on a shared tab for sushi, nights out, oat milk - this place would never belong to me. It belonged to her.

Amy Key’s Arrangements In Blue is a self-analyzation of her life, exploring her lack of romantic partner in coalition with her friendships, the idea of motherhood and making a home in the lens of Joni Mitchell’s Blue. In reflecting on her experiences with shared housing and now living alone, she says, “The pleasure of my things, being around my dependable things, is too great.” Key, a maximalist, talks of the importance of her things; a special pot for honey, sherry glasses, vases of every colour and size, all to welcome people into her home, the comfort this brings in knowing yourself and your life. In the Stratford-era of my life I acquired things in secret, hurrying off to my room buying flowers and fancy hand soap, wanting to enjoy their presence in my life, knowing a weird comment would be made. What I didn’t process at the time was that my flatmate would go into my room to take my window key and look around, seeing the life that I was making for myself, starting to obsessively use my handmade dishes and mugs and putting them in the dishwasher in protest.

My ‘perfect’ walls slowly dulled in my eyes when bugs easily trapping themselves in my lampshade. The rose coloured glasses slowly peeled themselves off my eyes like a yogi moving up to mountain pose, rolling up the spine from forward fold and letting each vertebra quietly awaken, developing first a soft awareness, then one of the whole body, all-encompassing, total.

The toilet broke, and then the other one. It took weeks to get fixed. I began moving my books into my room after I realised one day that the living room was a museum of my flatmate’s belongings. Her dog had an entire freezer drawer, and I wasn’t allowed to have another bag of frozen peas. The place where I slept and ate was Hers, the alarmingly amount of people that had moved in and out of its walls flashing before me in deep red.

Sighs becoming groans becoming back-handed comments becoming denial becoming not being British becoming violently yelling at landlords over video calls become crying like a hyena, begging to be noticed, a soundscape of its own. Was it the fall-out of a friendship never destined to work, a dependency wound unable to be fulfilled, that made my time in Stratford not a home, or was it the cheaply build exterior, the Balkan contractors whispering about the faulty job with the tiles in my bathroom, the crossed wires with the underfloor heating, their boss asking me to put socks on because I had ‘bosa noge’. I’d like to think it was both.

He predicted it correctly, the man who helped me move to Haggerston. I did go to the deli, about an hour before there was shouting through the rooms of my new flat. I had thought that ‘deli’ was a shop along the high street with a big yellow awning, parked next to Tesco and selling big sandwiches and Torres chips. I did go here in fact, about two hours after I moved in, procuring a mortadella and pecorino sandwich to take back to Highgate to get the rest of my belongings. I went there for months and then realized on a walk that he meant the De Beauvoir Deli, an N1 staple situated between green flags on my Google Maps, my new favourite pub, the garden centre, the roastery I have yet to go to. I went there by chance to get my Sunday coffee and write in my journal, and then this happened.

This is my home, MY HOME - this is just your house. This is not your home, she said.

My (new) flatmates and I, after weeks of passive aggressive texts, decided to have a meeting. Things weren’t getting resolved, things being a lack of communication coupled with cleaning and low-level respect. This place is more quiet, less friendly but in a way I don’t mind, except now, in the wake of our house meeting. Shouting, hiding behind phone screens instead of making eye contact, scoffs and soft blows of air through the gaps of teeth, this phrase lifted itself into the air of our living room, which was already starting to get stuffy from the beginnings of summer. After the meeting I got up and felt the phrase sitting heavily across my chest, wondering where home was after all of these months.

Are you home? I asked the espresso mugs I got for my birthday. No response.

What about you? to my library of fiction above my wardrobe, to the pictures of my friends, of my partner, little red carnations and a ring from my Baba that live on my windowsill?

Are you home? I asked to the my keys, jingling in my pocket as I walk to the station, the ones to the front door having a similar red casing to my old set, now coupled with work keys, a peeling Tesco Clubcard, and a library card.

You get to decide, the house on the back of my arm said, and I will remind you of the rest.