New Orleans
First thing you notice about Bywater are the roads. Cracked pavement, potholes patched with traffic cones, loose bricks and crooked sidewalks — I’m afraid I’ll twist an ankle exploring the neighborhood. But it’s a minor nuisance, because I can afford to walk slow here. That seems to be the general directive at least, to move slow. Time feels free. Down the block from our Airbnb is Crescent Park, a strip of green tucked between the Mississippi River and a commercial railroad that snakes along the bend. Every few days, I walk its one mile stretch towards French Quarter, down the riverfront path lined with rows of magnolias and dwarf palms, past the graffitied boxcars, past the stretch of flood wall and monuments without luster, past the steamboats and cargo ships gliding down the water. The air is crisp, the wind more cutting than what I had imagined for Louisiana in late Fall.
Everyone’s a neighbor. They make eye contact and smile and say hello, good morning, how are you, happy hump day! Greetings that could blossom into a fuller conversation if I took the time. I don’t, naturally. Just flash a quick smile and keep on, because you can’t just shake the New York out of you. I wander around the neighborhood, trying to remember the street names — Dauphine, Congress, Bartholomew, Royal — counting the fleur-de-lis on bumpers, trash bins, iron fences. I try out all the shops we could frequent in our half-mile radius: sunlit cafes, the bakery with three-dollar pastries, the no-frills po-boy shop, a jazz bar that Solange apparently likes. I walk by rows of shotgun houses with pastel fronts and shuttered windows, porches where the old neighbors sit by the sputtering radio. I listen to a man practice his trumpet from his garage.
How do you feel at home at an Airbnb? Ours certainly looks like a home, feels like a home. It has “personality”, or all the tiny quirks that constitute a home. The dresser that needs fidgeting to open. The expired tins of cajun spices in the pantry. Flea market paintings of brass bands and jazz festivals. The house smells of antiques and old wood. We cook eggs in a burnt pan, take out the trash on trash days. The windows are painted shut. When it’s sunny, we sit on the stoop and eat grapes. When it’s hot, we keep the front and back doors ajar to let the breeze cool the house. The walls shake when it thunders.
I’m finding that, ironically, it’s this homeyness that keeps me from settling in. There’s an added layer of intimacy in the contract that makes me feel indebted as the guest despite it still being a transactional relationship. Out of habit, I second guess how I should be behaving in the stranger’s home, as if purchased hospitality should still be treated with the same modesty and deference as at a family friend’s. Conversely, in a hotel room — with its starch dry sheets, brand-less toiletries, nondescript paintings of fruits and boats and other sterile objects — the curated lack of character demands less reflection. There’s no history attached. I can sit more comfortably when that leather armchair is owned by a faceless corporation and not Mindy the Irish transplant, who haggled for it at a friend’s yard sale down the street.
How much history can objects hold? How much of one’s life can they signify? I’ve always felt it intrusive to adopt someone’s possessions in their absence, even for a little while, to use their things as props for my own comfort, to leave my prints on their private lives. It’s irrational, I admit. These items could just be bargain finds from a sale at TJ Maxx and hold no sentimental value for the owner. But the space still represents a past sanctuary of sorts, and I’m compelled to engage with it with more respect than probably necessary.
Then there’s the matter of transience. I should be more used to it given how often my family moved. I wouldn’t go so far to describe my upbringing as “nomadic”, since the term presumes some wanderlust, and we were only chasing practicality. Three separate homes in Seoul. A transpacific journey and a stint near Vancouver. An apartment complex in the suburbs nears Boston with geriatric residents, frequented by ambulances and fire trucks. A few long stays at cheap hotels and family friends’ guest rooms. Shuffling around apartments, downsizing, then renting a house too big for just the two of us, then downsizing again once I left for college. When asked where my hometown is, I say near Boston, but I can’t pinpoint one neighborhood or the streets I grew up in, what my favorite spots are from adolescence. No place feels sacred.
The only constant I remember are the dinners before the move. Surrounded by boxes and bare walls, we would cook a few bags of Shin ramen in a lone steel pot, and we would eat in the living room with leftover chopsticks, a cardboard box serving as our dining table. It was a quiet tradition, though even this came to an end when my mom decided to head back to Korea, stowing away our family possessions in a storage unit off a New Jersey turnpike. One might think all that moving would have forced us to be judicious with our belongings. Yet, this 10 x 10 corner of New Jersey holds my sixth grade English projects, half-empty college notebooks, first Christmas gifts from Sharper Image, my mom’s bed frame I hid under as a kid, the dining table I sat at every night to finish my homework. All the pieces of my home are all there.
I’m finding the lack of a permanent address to be more tiresome than I had imagined. Perhaps, now, I would like to compensate instead of leaning into what I believed was an immutable condition. Being untethered has been a blessing in some regards. Temporary stays afford you emotional detachment, and I can float on without bounds, live out new adventures, have the freedom to start over, continuously. I get to try out new cities and see what I like and dislike. Summer in Chicago is gorgeous; D.C. museums are hard to beat; music is ever-present in New Orleans. But all this is not without consequences. As antsy as we were after staying through the pandemic, leaving New York was no small decision. We had a community there, and I felt a belonging I haven’t felt in a long time. Instead, for every new place, we have to decide what we can bring and what we have to shed, what new friendships to invest in that will last after the goodbyes. It’s a constant alienation.
Maybe it’s because I’m thirty now and (supposedly, as so many have pointed out on my birthday) officially old, but “settling down” doesn’t sound so dreadful anymore. Is it such a concession of my youth that I want something permanent? A fixture for my family’s things. Neighbors I can catch up with. Still, I’m not longing as much as just curious. I suppose home has always been something different for me, and I wonder how much a house will change that. For what is home but a familiar warmth, a hug from a friend, memories of my parents, late night ramen out of the pot, songs from an ancient playlist, the smell of wet leaves in October, the moment when you feel seen. A constant born from fleeting circumstances, revisited again and again and again.