For most people home is a house, at least in literal terms. It’s brick and mortar, floorboards, paint, and curtains. Maybe it’s where you’re born, where you raise your own family, or where you live with two of your best friends and a stray cat. It’s four walls and a roof that shelters you from the rain. It’s not that simple though, is it? Maybe home is a town or a city. Streets you can navigate on autopilot, familiar fish and chip shops, trees you used to climb and your footprints concreted into the sidewalk. I think for some people home is a season. Hot chocolate and pumpkin pie by a fireplace as snow falls, or a barbecue, white wine and lawn games with your cousins. Home can be people too. The ones who are exactly who you need them to be, or they’re not but they’re trying. The one you watch TV with as the world caves in. Maybe home is just soap scum, pantry moth, and bin night. A perennial loop of making a mess and cleaning it up again. Sometimes it’s just a feeling. Head in the clouds or feet on the ground or both at the same time. When you’ve drunk just enough wine to feel fuzzy and charming. The warmth of your arms in the holes of your boyfriend’s sweater. Maybe home is your refuge, your identity, your potential. For me though, home is a house.

“It’s a girl” is spray-painted in clumsy black capital letters on a scrappy piece of once-white tarp that hangs over the porch fence. The makeshift banner is covered in ambiguous stains, remnants of the four-and-a-half years since it was created and since it was used to protect cubby-house carpet from paint splatter, barbecues from rain. A row of broken bricks holds it in place. The whole scene is slapdash in an excited way that betrays the father as its creator. The mother, though equally excited, hides it in well-planned composure. Her letters would be carefully stenciled. Inside, the little girl for whom the sign was first made smothers her new baby sister in kisses. Lips purse at the newborn’s cheek, tiny hands try their best to be gentle as they cradle her soft head, eyes cartoonishly big and sparkling blue peer up through long lashes as the mother says, “Hold it there,” and snaps her shot. The baby’s eyes dart over her big sister’s face in uncertainty and awe, and that dynamic of smothering love and cautious admiration won’t ever change.

The photos are sepia-toned; flesh pantyhose stretched over the camera lens my mother’s 1990 answer to a flattering filter. But in my mind, the house is so vibrant it can’t be real. 3 Bond Street is the house I came home to when I was born. It’s where my mother lives today. She keeps the original real-estate ad on the fridge: “A grand old Victorian gentleman’s residence. A prestige property situated on two allotments. Corner position. The residence requires some further redecorating, painting as well as landscaping.” The house is a soft blueish-gray Tuscan-rough render, accentuated by ornate white trimmings. A large verandah wraps around the front and one side, where a huge rainwater tank and Hills Hoist hide behind a majestic jacaranda tree. The grass is too green as it funnels from the street to the front steps. Curated garden beds compliment the tree that rains purple leaves onto the perfect lawn in a way that Mum calls decorating, Dad calls littering. Lavender, African daisies, and agapanthus line the fence. The house’s grandeur alongside ramshackle brown-brick flats feels almost spotlit. The sky is too blue.

A decade passes. Redecorating, painting, and landscaping happen and happen again. The nursery murals, which once made people gasp at my mother’s talent, wondering what potential she might be wasting, become a source of embarrassment for me and are painted a sunny yellow at my request as teddy bears are shoved into boxes. My sister’s room, once dusty pink, is painted teal, black, and white in honor of her favorite football team and the boys she wants to impress. The playroom is intended to become a formal lounge but it’s never quite finished and we call it “the empty room.”

It’s that room we spread out in when we get home late from the Royal Show. We sit on the floor among growing piles of showbags as Dad does multiple trips to the car just to bring them all in. I’m hyped up on fairy floss and Coke and a feeling I now recognize as privilege but back then just felt was what I deserved for being so special and so loved. My friends have to pick just one showbag, but I get them all and so does my sister and so does my mum. We bask in blow-up bats that won’t last the week, scary masks, and Bertie Beetles. Mum can’t hide her childlike excitement, and Dad hides his dismay at our indulgence in the pride of what he can provide. The tasteful vastness of that empty room is momentarily tainted by our extravagance. The walls are painted a deep dark purple. Four sconces direct light at the white plaster world of roses and swirls on the ceiling so far above us that if you zoomed out, we’d barely exist there at all. My mother is skilled at drawing the eye away from damp stains toward delightful design. Dried flowers burst out of the fireplace that doesn’t work.

The walls of the empty room come down soon after; Mum’s open-plan dream Dad never agrees with. The hallway opens into the empty room, which opens into the kitchen, and emptiness spreads itself out until it feels like the roof might fall down on us. Mum hangs her photography on the progressively cracking walls and her nonchalance on cracking bonds. I feel weird in my body and braces make my smile hurt. All I want is to fade into normalcy but my house is too unique. I want Foxtel, not a sculpture of Aphrodite. A new puppy is supposed to cheer me up, but it leaves yellow patches on the perfect lawn and there’s a bitterness in Dad that Mum can’t hang anything on. I hear things I shouldn’t because there aren’t enough walls. They subdivide the land and then they subdivide our lives.

Mum works nights now and the hollow house consumes me. I fill it with friends and pre-drinks and makeup and trying on each other’s clothes until we abandon it until the early hours of a new day. I spend a night in the bathroom. The only room never renovated. Its 70s pink-brown tiles with a swan motif I’ve never noticed before now. It’s dusty. There’s a millipede too close to me but I can’t move away from it. Light filters in through glass-brick windows and I stagger into bed at last. This room was a sanctuary, but it spoiled over time as the expectations of a childhood full of murals, fairy floss, and jacaranda trees went unmet. Spoiled again by the longing for who’s not there and the shame of who is. The ceiling doesn’t feel so high anymore.

The empty room fills with boxes of my belongings as I prepare to move far away. Mum buys a Bluetooth speaker to fill the emptiness with sound. The trailer is packed in the most practical way and her sunglasses stay on for two days straight. In my absence, she redecorates and paints and landscapes. Walls go back up and when Dad hears about that he won’t let it go. He’s not who I need him to be but he’s trying.

More years pass. I’m home for Christmas with the person I’ve chosen to be my person-home. We pull into the driveway and the sky is too blue and the grass is too green and Mum’s on the porch feeding birdseed to pigeons and I laugh, struck by the familiar rush of difficult love for a house, a city, a person, and a feeling. The hallway feels sturdy again and just the right amount of vast as we walk in together. The sounds of my nieces and nephew playing in the lounge are muffled just enough. Green and yellow light dapples through the lead-light windows that Mum made herself. Kaleidoscopes on the carpet I want to lie down on and sink into because I too am a relic in the making.

-Britney Keech

Britney Keech is a thirty-one-year-old living in Melbourne with her partner, Harry, and cat, Walter. She works as a clinical neuropsychologist in a public hospital. She has done a couple of creative writing courses, but is very new to putting her words out there! Find her on Instagram @britneykeech