Home/Unhome
Because of the Coronavirus pandemic, I’m back sleeping in my childhood bedroom. Literally on the same mattress and in the same bedding where my high school boyfriend used to sneak into my room at night and rape me. Things are, of course, very different now. I’ve healed considerably, and have used dance and choreography to process and share so much of what being a survivor means. I’m a completely different person than who I was with him.
But sometimes I still have flashbacks, sometimes I can see his face around the corner or hear his voice on the other side of my bedroom door. It feels as if the things that took place here didn’t just happen to me, it happened to the furniture, the curtains, the house, the air.
And those things remember.
episode
1
I explore this feeling of living in a haunted house. I connect with the objects in my home which are generally objects of comfort, but often bring unwelcome memories. The furniture holds memories and we have a dialogue with each other so that I may come to a place of acceptance and forgiveness of a difficult past, and rediscover joy in spaces that used to represent anguish.
We are leaving this home. I suffer from sentimentality, I vow to keep on remembering. I find personal objects that conjure more than emotions, I pay homage to them, I wonder what memories they might hold in their time-bound innocence. I’m conflicted with relief and regret in the bittersweet closing of a chapter that has encompassed most of my existence thus far.
episode
2
episode
3
I ask whether or not the house still remembers everything now that the furniture, the paintings, the souls are gone. I try to decide if an empty house can still be a home. I find ways to store some of the memories in my own body, so that I may carry them with me, and I purposefully leave some behind. This place was never mine. We do not own spaces. I recognize the ancestors who inhabited this space before me, I thank this house for being my home, and I welcome all that it will hold in the future.