Light and Shadow by Emily Gough
All photography by Paris Naik-Neenan
‘But does it feel like home, sweetheart?’
Your mother watched you closely from across your kitchen table, her expression imploring, a touch concerned, and the sight of it made you avert your eyes and turn them instead to the mug between your hands.
Home.
What is that supposed to feel like?
You smiled and assured her that, despite having only lived in your new house for a few short months, you thought it did. She smiled but seemed only half convinced by your answer.
The question continued to rattle around in your mind long after you waved her off from your doorstep, and she began the drive back through the drizzling rain towards your childhood home. Your first home. No matter how long it had been since you had lived there, your parents’ house would always be a home to you, and up until now you hadn’t truly stopped to consider what it was that made it a home. Or, to use your mother’s words, what made it feel like home.
Your mother would always be the embodiment of home, you thought. She would always remind you of those blushing clouds, of summer evening when the warmth begins to chill as you rush through the door just in time for dinner, of quiet evenings by the fire and fuzzy Christmas mornings.
Home had always felt like comfort, relief, a place where you could shed all your illusions and be unreservedly yourself. It was a place without judgement or fear.
It felt warm, like a crackling fire or the old space heater your father used to flick on upstairs, with its musty smell and strange, stale heat. It was the irregular shapes the sun would imprint upon the table, the counter, the hallway carpet. It felt achingly familiar.
It was a place where you had your own space on the shoe rack, your own set of keys in the bowl, your own mug and place at the table. Home was where your fondest memories lay in a kaleidoscope of colour, pink summer evenings and watery winter mornings gazing out the window and feeling incredibly glad to be on the inside of the glass.
Home was a safe place where you could nurture your hopes, figure out your goals, build the path to your future. It was a place to smile at the changing sky and dare to dream, a place where you could afford to romanticise the world and your place within it.
You glanced around your kitchen as you stand over the sink, hands absently washing away your mother’s lipstick stain from the rim of the mug she used earlier that day, and you wondered when that romance had died.
You shivered and turned to the living room, thinking about that path you built, how it had led you to a tiny shared dorm and three strangers who became friends, and then to a shared house where those friends became family. You made a home there, too, one that was alight with laughter and enthusiasm, with lamplight and late-night coffees, the frantic clicking of keyboards and turning papers. But student life is only temporary, and that home is now just a house, some distant place that is no longer yours outside of those fond memories and photographs.
You hoped that one day, this house would share that fuzzy, rosy light that you looked back on so fondly. That was the crux of the issue – you had told your mother that it did feel like a home, but did it truly? Was it a home, or just a house? You thought that maybe you needed more time, that six months wasn’t enough to make that sort of judgement. You tried not to dwell on it.
Instead, you busied yourself arranging and rearranging the ornaments on the mantel piece above the small fire. You couldn’t quite figure out where to place your little standing clock, the one that looks so similar to the one your parents used to own before the cat knocked it off and broke it. You tried not to dwell on much at all anymore, not when it came to the house.
Not on the fact that the house faced the crumbling pier that stretched out beyond the beach below the cliff’s ominous edge.
Not on the way the churning waves that thrashed against the rocks were such a harsh contrast to the football field behind your parent’s home, the one you used to sprint laps around as a child.
Not on the whitewash building you now lived in, that was such a dull contrast to the pale yellow your mother had chosen for her own house, nor on the fact that your front door was certainly not as welcoming as the bold burgundy door with its ridiculous coloured glass you had grown accustomed to in your student house.
Not the fact that you still crept through the place like it wasn’t yours, that your steps reverberated around the empty spaces, that you yourself became an empty space when the sun went down, and you had nothing more to do.
You adjusted your few knick-knacks on the mantel piece one last time before perching on the sofa. The leather cold against your back, and you looked out at the black maw of the hallway that lurked beyond the living room door, brushing the edges of the doorframe, and making it seem like there was nothing beyond it at all. It made you uneasy. The lamplight glowed soft and warm from behind you and struggled to penetrate the void-like mouth of the doorway that led to the rest of the house. You thought there was a metaphor in there somewhere.
You sighed and admitted to yourself that this house is like something drained, dressed in colours that lacked colour, with cold corners and hard edges.
This house was not what you wanted.
But you make sacrifices for the people you love, no? And it surely was love that convinced you to move all the way out here, to a house that skirted the coast.
And, surely, you would grow to love the house, too; maybe enough for you to call it a home – for you to feel that it is a home.
You curled up on the sofa, alone again. The rain began spluttering against the windows as the shadows drew in, and any notions you ever had of home suddenly felt terribly far away.
Words by Emily Gough
Photography by Paris Naik-Neenan
Edited by Tillie Holmes