Two weeks ago, I moved into my first apartment. I have the privilege of living in a bright, homey little place with high ceilings and two balconies, and that of living with my best friend. As my mom got ready to leave, she told me how excited she was for us. “You and Renée are both so stubborn,” she said, “and you know what you need.” She also pointed out how lucky we are to have in-house laundry. “I didn’t have that until I was in grad school,” she said wistfully. I hugged her goodbye, and walked inside feeling self-possessed and splendidly grown up.
“What do we do now?” Renée asked me when I got to the top of the stairs. Her eyes were red and I had a painful lump pressing against the back of my throat. Under the kitchen’s brash overhead light we surveyed our unfamiliar pantry. “My dad makes really good chili,” Renée said. I said I’d ask my mom about her bolognese. We turned off the kitchen light and scurried into the living room to wait for communications from headquarters. And so, our first evening passed.
At IKEA the next day, I campaigned for smaller serving bowls—not for practicality (in fact, against it) but because they were the closest to the blue ceramic ones that nestle above the counter at home. Renée was used to the big plates with bowl-esque rims. We settled civilly in the middle, and the medium-sized gray bowls remain jarringly foreign to us both.
My mom is right that Renée and I are as strong-willed as we are assured in our sensibilities. But during our first weeks living in a home of our own, that grounded self-possession—and the energy that went into it—morphed into a vehicle in which we carried and displayed the sensibilities of those who had raised us. When we disagreed about whether butter should be kept in the fridge or on the counter, it was not a fight of personal convictions, but a defence of our upbringings, which were, now, our only grounds of familiarity. The confident composure with which we seasoned a chicken breast with oregano and cumin was a weak cover for our desperation to enact our parents—the same way a toddler repeats a curse word proudly without knowing what it means. The moment our parents drove away we pledged a new patriotism to their ideologies—those from which we had worked so hard for so long to diverge, rebel against, and reimagine.
I have since become fond of the way in which Renée and I are growing in two directions at once—returning to the absolute dependency of childhood while turning into the oldest and most capable versions of ourselves. We filled those first days living alone together with stories—of how to use old tomatoes, find the studs in the wall, and cook with the doors closed so our sheets wouldn’t smell like garlic—all gathered from the lived encyclopedia of our separate lives, and brought forward for reference, comparison, and evaluation.
Now, two weeks after moving in, our parents’ world has settled around us and from it, the buds of a world completely ours have started to spring, in more and less glamorous ways. Only yesterday Renée and I stood on the back porch surveying our trash bin, alive and teeming with maggots. She and I put on gloves and an apron respectively and poured kettle after kettle of boiling water down the trash bin walls and into its infested ridges until our thousands of writhing rice-sized foes had been boiled to death and flushed down the toilet.
Amidst groceries, bills, and maggots, Renée and I are finding our sea legs on the current of adult independence, where we are worldlier, intuitive with spices, and conscious of our energy consumption. But to get here we had to hold tightly to our parents’ hands, becoming, for a fleeting moment, children again—but this time with in-house laundry.
