Work Text:
home is a place and home is a feeling and
home is fixing your sink when it floods your floors
home is brooming the dirt when your flowerpot turns
home is picking up the broken pieces and putting them away
home is a breath, and a nap, and the sun smiling at you kindly.
Their apartment is not big, but it’s far from cramped.
It is white-walled and wooden-floored. The bathroom is wrapped in teal tiles, there’s an infiltration in its ceiling, and its window faces south, always bright and sunlit. The grey floor tile next to the sink is cracked at the corner and the tiling above the showerhead hasn’t been there since before they moved in.
Their refrigerator makes a constant humming sound that is as good as white noise. They painted one of the kitchen walls into a blackboard, and spent a whole afternoon drawing on it together, their hands and hair and cheeks stained in chalk dust, their kisses dry and bitter.
When you walk in, through the maroon door that gets stuck in the humid, hot summers, past the peeling golden of the lock and the foggy peephole, the living room doesn’t quite look like a living room. To your right there’s a sofa bed, turquoise and tiny, that’s not often used as a sofa nor as a bed. It sits there, home for folded blankets and a kitschy embroidered cushion they got from Qifrey’s old professor. Eastheth has sat on it with his hands shaking around their good porcelain teacup and talked to Qifrey about Utowin. Alaira has sat on it and told them stories of her work, stories that left them both surprised and worried. Qifrey has sat on it and beckoned Orugio closer, closer, when he was upset or angry or too lost in his own head.
To your left, there are boxes. They never quite moved in; they never quite found a place for Orugio’s encyclopaedias, for Qifrey’s framed puzzles, for their thick travel coats. There is also their shoe rack, one row with their trainers and dress shoes and Orugio’s years-old pair of Birkenstocks, and one row for guests.
Up ahead, there’s a doorway, doorless. It leads to what was once a bedroom, but is now their shared office, with built-in closets to one side of the room, stacked with art supplies, clothes and shelves. Some of Orugio’s books, architecture and design and visual arts, thick and hard-covered, are too tall for the shelves, so they sit in horizontal piles. Their shared literature, poetry or old worn sketchbooks sit messily, disorganised, with no rhyme or reason, jumping from thrillers to children’s, and from memoirs to leather-bound snapshots of their own lives and ideas. Pushed against the other wall, opposite the closets, is the long worktop plank that both use as a desk, laptops and cords curling around themselves, loose sheets of paper fluttering when they leave the window open.
If you walk back to the front door—their doormat was once one of the normal, plain brown ones, but Qifrey spilled ink on it once, leaving an odd and misshapen black smudge across a third of it. They liked it that way, or, they never bothered to get a new one—, and look out once again at the apartment, you see another door, to the further right of the room. They don’t have a hallway, just doors. If you stand in this threshold, also doorless, you can see every other room of the flat; it opens out into the kitchen and shows you the doors to both the bedroom—once main, now only—and the bathroom.
Their bedroom is last. Their bedroom is holy and profane. It is the warmest room in the flat; they, too, wish it wasn’t.
There isn’t much to the bathroom that hasn’t been said. Or perhaps, the wicker basket of bath bombs next to the shower-and-tub. Perhaps the wild berries body wash and the long-gone 3-in-1 shampoo—Orugio’s insistence on practicality, and Qifrey’s firm reassurance that he’d break off their then month-long relationship over this. Perhaps the bamboo toothbrushes and the homemade sticker on the mirror. Perhaps the utility closet with cleaning supplies, bulk detergent and a foldable broom and dustpan set.
The kitchen is vaguely L-shaped; still standing there, in the doorway, you have the bathroom in front of you and the bedroom immediately to your left, so there are two clear paces to access both those rooms. To your right, a dining table, round and varnished carved oak, picked up at an antiques sale and effortfully carried up the stairs of their apartment building. Behind it, walnut cupboards mounted on the wall, a décor nightmare if not for the painting on its doors, the only piece of Qifrey’s in the whole place. It’s of the view from their bedroom window—we’ll get there. On the wall next to the table, the divider between the kitchen and the living room, there are white chalk vines creeping up to the ceiling and a poorly-erased shopping list in pink and yellow and green. There are chalk-pen drawings of onions and spinach and cauliflowers, there are snippets of poetry they once serenaded to one another.
The slimmer part of the kitchen, pushed aside by the square metres of bathroom, houses their sink, their fridge and their stove. It houses the small attempt at a countertop and the couple of fruit basket racks where they keep their non-refrigerated, well, fruits and veggies. It’s also where the main window of the apartment is; their ceilings are not particularly high, so to say that this window reaches from the counter to near the ceiling is not saying too much, but it’s more than enough. It faces south, the same wall as their bathroom, and keeps their flat well-lit at all times. The kitchen, at least.
Their bedroom faces east.
Their bedroom window, which takes up most of their east-facing wall, gives them a view of the rest of the city. Some of the skyscrapers downtown, albeit sparse, then the residential neighbourhoods, and even a bit of forest, far into the horizon. Their bed is pushed right underneath it, so the sunrise lights up the wall opposite them in clear white and streaks of golden, purpling the night sky in graceful pinks and that shy white-blue, tentatively turning the leaf on another day. The forest tells them the seasons; it’s bright green in the spring and dark green in the summer, it’s sunset-gold for most of autumn, and grey, sometimes snowy and white, when winter comes.
Their mattress is king-sized and expensive, but it doesn’t have a frame. It’s supported on driftwood planks and nails that Orugio didn’t buy, but got—his parents’ housewarming gift wasn’t a set of kitchen utensils, a throw pillow, or books. It was a toolbox and a first-aid kit.
Their room is mostly minimalistic, their bed dead-centre and aligned under the window. By the left wall—from the door, and right from the bed—there’s a clothing rack with common items and accessories, and on the right, drawings and paintings made by Qifrey’s students, his pride and joy. They’re hung from yarn after the proven ineffectiveness of tape, and there’s always space for one more.
When they moved in, empty walls and empty floors, they sat in the kitchen, the room still warm from the summer sunset, and shared glasses of wine.
“It’s not much,” Qifrey said, a smile faint and soft on his lips, the drawstrings of his cotton shirt pulled wide from the heat and showing the warm expanse of his collarbones and his chest. The flat looked both bigger and smaller in its emptiness; it’s hard to describe the feeling of moving into a new place, of finding somewhere to belong.
“It’s ours,” Orugio said in response, his words sunny. Qifrey laughed, nodded, agreed. Orugio reached for his hand and took it.