At Home

I’ve come a long way to get here.

I’m very attached to specific dates in my life, especially ones that relate to our relationship: the day Ahmad and I first met online, the day we first met face to face, when we officially started dating, the day he proposed, the first time we attended a formal event together, our engagement date, the day we bought our apartment and such. I’ll even remember when we bought certain items or had certain experiences because I am sentimental like that.

It so happens that we’ve been calling the apartment our own for exactly a year, and much like us and our relationship, it’s come a long, long way.

It’s gone from being just an apartment with walls and floors to being something we can both be proud to call our own and come home to at the end of the day. And I say that fully knowing that it is still incomplete and largely un-decorated. There are still no books or clothes or signs that indicate who its owners are, yet it is slowly taking shape.

Or maybe, my perspective after spending a few consecutive weekends supervising the installation of random things in the several rooms, I’m finally seeing our vision take shape.

We’re also highhandedly contributing to a lot of waste!

It used to be that I would go to the apartment and feel it was lacking something: some heart and soul. I’d walk into the main area and find everything covered with plastic and see that there were more things missing than already there.

And whenever I would share that feeling with family and friends, they would say that this is normal, that homes are not built overnight.

But given my disinterest in having a large, well-planned wedding, the house was everything I was putting my weight into. I spent hours looking at decorating ideas and thinking of how my dream kitchen would turn out. My feet hurt from going from one furniture shop to the other and my eyes could no longer discern one color of paint from the next.

So I wanted to see results, and I wanted to see them fast!

We’d go out shopping and end up buying things for the house that would just take up space in our spare storage bedroom. And they’d sit there for months accumulating, wondering if we would ever remove them from their boxes.

Till we got to this point. Where we have all these things and a beautifully set up home but we can’t use them just yet because there’s still some time to go.

Now, I walk into the apartment and feel that it’s ready to be lived in.

The kitchen, for example, is full of all the needed essentials, that even the cutlery is in its right place. We make jokes that we could, at any second, order pizza from our favorite joint and have a great meal without feeling anything is missing.

And I’m even starting to feel bothered by all the clutter and the mess that a year’s worth of moving has resulted in.

I know that there’s still time to go, but it’s starting to finally feel like we’re at home.