Starter Home

This charming Denver bungalow is narrow and long like a yawn. You won’t live here long enough to remember it, but if you did, you might see crown molding tracing the outline of its 650 square feet and ceilings vintage enough to have hairline fractures in the plaster. This is the only house you will live in with your father.

Beachfront Motel

An extended-stay unit in Treasure Island, Florida that is perfect for people like your mother who need to relocate too quickly to line up something permanent. The bruises on her skin travelled with you across state borders, but you’re only seven, and she doesn’t want to tell you that yet. This property’s kitchen needs minor cosmetic repairs, but it has everything you need to move in—a fridge and a single-burner hot plate bolted to the counter. Even though you’ll walk to the beach with a sand bucket every day for two months, you’ll think you’re only taking a vacation.

Single-Story Ranch Home in St. Petersburg, Florida

Your budget won’t get you anything with an ocean view, but this property has a small pond just across the street. Your mother will paint the exterior tangerine and the neighbors will hate you for it. When you’re hunting alligators in the pond shallows, Katrina’s outer storm bands will arrive to chase you home, and the house paint will glow like a lighthouse through the rain. Hurricanes will take down every fence your mother builds, so mid-elementary school, she’ll give up on coastal living.

The Christian Retreat

Here, “hotel-style” lodging is provided at a discount in exchange for mandatory church attendance. You and your mother work as housekeepers to stay under budget. In youth group, you’re told to speak in tongues; kids seize their shoulders before collapsing to the ground around you. Guilt and the fear of God command you to join the performance. You lower yourself onto your knees.

This property has a bonus room: the tabernacle. On a weekday, you and a friend find it unlocked and consume two loaves of communion bread. It feels good to take something that isn’t yours.

Mom’s Convertible Mustang

You sleep across the back seat, your feet tucked under your mom’s reclined driver’s-side bed. Your Uncle Joe tells you that someone is going to knife through the convertible top, but for a few days, you can’t afford to be anywhere else. You stare at the roof and wait for the canvas to tear open. You wait to stargaze.

The Domestic Violence Shelter

When touring this property, you suspect it isn’t quite the right fit for you. Your father did hit your mother—but it’s been at least four years since you’ve seen him. For a few weeks, though, you will each have beds. You store the food you buy in individually labeled cubbies, and you look forward to your meals of Cosmic Brownies and chewy granola bars. It’s at this point, when you’re in the middle-age of your adolescence, that you find yourself aching to settle down. House touring isn’t as fun when there’s no end in sight. The woman who shares your room sings to her toddler, and by proxy, to you, every night: “Oh, Savannah, don’t you cry for me...”

Uncle John’s Basement

Back in Colorado for a year so you can attend your third or fourth elementary school. John tells your mom that his old roommate hung himself in the basement, where you sleep now, and you’ll move soon after that. The ghost of the man seems to come with you.

Grandma’s Basement

This three-level home has an unfinished basement your grandma always planned on renovating and a mountain view that accrues equity every year. Your grandma will make you and your mother share a basement room even though there are empty beds on every floor. In this basement, you build pyramids out of cups and knock them down with a plastic sword, or maybe a pool noodle you imagine to be a sword. The noise of the cups against the cement floor must be unbearable, because when the door at the top of the stairs opens, your mother shouts: “Be quiet. Your Uncle John is fucking dead.” She says this in such a way that, for a moment, you are sure it was you who killed him. You will find it hard to forgive her for this.

The Fixer-Upper Triplex

With the money your mother receives from John’s estate, she tells the realtor she wants to look at project properties. You live in the open construction zone of this Tennessee triplex for two years. In the summers, to avoid your family, you go full nocturne—sleeping until sunset, talking to friends on internet forums that you know you won’t lose the next time you move. Your mother rents out the triplex units as they become available, but because she doesn’t think to get anyone to sign a lease, she loses more money than she invests. When you leave this house, it doesn’t feel like leaving—it feels preordained.

Grandma’s Basement, Again

Maybe before Tennessee, or maybe in the middle of your time there, your mother leaves you here for five months and won’t answer her phone. Your grandma is talented at making this feel normal. She tries to give you her dead son’s childhood bedroom, but every time you unmake his bed, she is unmade a little, too. The basement room is the only one where messes don’t make her panic. Every night, she leaves a bowl of Cheerios on the kitchen table before she goes to sleep; when you wake up, you always find a single-serving pitcher of milk waiting for you in the fridge. You learn this is how easy it is to feel cared for.

Denver Motel 6 with Amenities, Including a Waffle House Next Door

This cozy option has a room big enough for two king beds. You learn that most hotels discount their prices if you pay by month instead of by night, though being unable to afford a home is still more expensive than rent. Your mom pulls you out of your Tennessee middle school without telling your teachers about your forthcoming truancy. She tells you she’s hiding from people who want to kill her and kidnap you—your father is one of these people, apparently, even though you haven’t seen him for years. Later, you’ll learn the ways trauma comes to haunt a person, but in the hotel, you only know what it means to be resentful. She says you can never use your real first name online. When you make new Internet forum profiles—she found a way to separate you from your online friends after all—you call yourself Tamara. In the afternoons, you walk to Waffle House to eat a side of hash browns for a meal, which you secretly love, and you call yourself Tamara there, too. After returning to 8th grade after missing nearly half a semester, your teachers are kind enough to allow you to attend high school anyway. Thirteen years later, when you’re living on your own, you might occasionally feel like you’ve made a deadly mistake when you type your real name on personality quizzes or job applications.

Pastel Pink Single-Wide Trailer in Grand Lake, Colorado

Your mother buys this property sight unseen. She knows living at an elevation of 8,000 feet in this valley will require the purchase of a snowmobile to go to work or shop for groceries. She moves you there anyway. After you’ve been enrolled in 10th grade for three weeks and the time comes to actually acquire a snowmobile, she changes her mind; you’ll move away from the mountains.

Rental in the Colorado Plains

Your mom finds a boyfriend after you go back to Tennessee and eventually convinces him to move to Colorado. You’ll officially be a teenager and he’s officially the worst. Luckily, you have the whole basement to yourself, and your air mattress becomes a kind of island. Since you can’t afford an internet bill, you borrow your mom’s laptop every day, walk it to the library, and load 30 YouTube videos to watch in your room. For Christmas, the boyfriend cuts down a small tree that looks like scrub brush, and the three of you sit on the floor around it. You have a wonderful time. You won’t talk to anyone at school, not even your teachers. What could you tell them? Then you move back to the mountains.

Your Friend’s Purple Bedroom

Your friend’s parents in Tennessee offer to host you for two weeks. You can tell they can’t quite afford to feed an extra person, but they always offer you seconds first. Your friend and her mother have an ongoing battle the entire time you know them, one that goes on no matter what house they live in. An imitation Tiffany table lamp with purple and blue panels of stained glass moves from your friend’s bedside table to her mother’s cozily overburdened bookshelf and back to your friend’s bedroom desk. When you return to your friend’s room after a day at the mall and she finds the lamp missing, she shouts, “Mom!” and you’ll hear a laugh float across the house. This is where you will learn that some fights can be tender.

Rental in Buena Vista, Colorado

Here, you’ll be able to attend the same high school for two years in a row. You’ve never figured out the linguistic calculus necessary to determine what makes a place a hometown, but when you graduate from high school and move to Denver on your own, you’ll reason this answer is as good as any.

Bonus Clips

The first time you resign a lease and contract yourself to living in the same apartment for two years, you lose attraction to the preposition from. The concept of a forever home makes your bones feel bound in your skin. It’s the temporary places that nourish you. Your university puts you up at a D.C. hotel during your first conference, and suddenly your life is renovated with marble floors and an indoor waterfall. In only a month, the hostel in Seoul with the waterlogged pink walls and unlevel bed frame becomes your happiest home. The Red Roof Inn in Houston and the red-bricked Chicago loft your partner booked on Airbnb—these are the destinations that tether your long-distance relationship while you finish each of your graduate degrees.

But you are from somewhere. You have to own up to it. At some point during the Florida years—you can’t unscramble the timeline enough to discern when, much less how—you found yourself on a yacht, an honest-to-god yacht with a kitchen and multiple staircases and a swimming pool. This memory feels unfaithful to all the other homes you filmed in. How can you claim, really claim, the experience of sleeping in a car when you also had these unaccountable moments of access to another kind of life? On the yacht, you helped yourself from piles of foods you’d never even seen before; a teenager poured multiple beers onto the deck and laughed as his dog, who obediently licked up the mess, had trouble keeping its footing on the lurching floor. Women wore gossamer bathing suit covers instead of wrapping themselves in threadbare towels. You used the same generic sunscreen you would have had anywhere else; you don’t remember being brave enough to sit on any of the genuine leather seats. Your mother was with you but not, pretending she fit in with the adults on the deck above where you spent most of the day. You wish you could untether this memory from the dock and watch the tide rock it away. You wish the shoreline would uncomplicate itself.

Taylor Kirby is a writer from Denver, Colorado currently living in Austin, Texas. Her recent work appears in Cream City Review, Booth, Hobart, and as a Best American Essays 2021 Notable.

Dylan Lewis (untitled, b/w negative) is a photographer, writer and visual artist based in Richmond, Virginia. Navigating the relationship between image, language and narrative, his work constructs a space where the ontological unease of “documentary” photography, the aestheticizing eye of fiction and the emotional texture of dreams within an always-already fractured reality intertwine.

This essay was originally published in Salt Hill 46.