Today’s is the vignettiest of vignettes as I have about seventeen deadlines breathing down my neck. This is part of a new thing I’m trying, where I write more casual, shorter, off-the-cuff posts. See other editions here, here, and here!
I started writing something for today about the way that having time-space synesthesia structures my psyche, but it proved too unmanageable for a day stacked with urgent deadlines. Paying attention to one mode of thinking, however, has the effect of exposing other companion modes, which brings me to what I want to write about today: mental spaces of potential.
While I don’t keep Instagram or even the Substack apps on my phone because of their addictive nature, I do allow Zillow and Rightmove (a similar UK-based app) prime real estate. As K and I continue to live in a liminal state, I find myself digitally cruising house listings in any number of locations, jonesing for an answer about our life. Imagination is as good a dopamine rush as any.
I’ll back up a bit: If you’ve been reading Othertongue for a while, then you know that we arrived in LA in December, where we were lucky to live in my parents’ home while figuring out our long-term plan. Then, the house burned down in the Palisades’ fire, and given that K is looking for work and I was already nine weeks pregnant, we decided to hunker down with my parents at their house in Wyoming.
We had an idea that we’d likely move to Seattle, where I’d lived briefly before meeting Kevin. I’d loved it there, with its lush flora and stunning mountain views. But when we took a scouting trip in March, it became clear that it wasn’t the right place for us to move speculatively. Fast-forward three months and I’m somewhere between six and eight weeks away from giving birth and we are no closer to a long-term location. With the political situation the way it is and economic instability withering the job market even further, we’ve put a return to London on the table. It feels absurd, but as my friend said to me this morning, it makes sense to open up the entire map in our situation. On a networking call yesterday, K learned that a company had moved all its operations roles to Portugal. “Would we do that?” I asked him. It was both a rhetorical and real question, to which the answer is “maybe!”
As the gauntlet towards giving birth narrows, our short-term options contract along with it. Moving after 36 weeks isn’t recommended, nor is relocating before the baby is 6 weeks old. This information hasn’t stopped me from checking my saved searches first thing every morning. What potential was listed in the past 24 hours? I must know!
Of course, these mental spaces of potential are about more than where we might live. When I imagine us, our not-yet-born baby, and Macaroni inside various floor plans and wonder if could we live there, I am doing more than just asking a question about place. I am asking for answers about our future and guidance for stability in what has proven to be a tumultuous eight years. I am asking about where we will live but also who the four of could us be in that house in [NAME ANY LOCATION]. This house in a more rural East Coast location might allow me to spend more time writing speculatively, but this one in North London would allow us to bring the baby to pubs and a short stroll away from my favorite bakeries. It’s a coping strategy that I’m okay with, because knowing that we will have a home of our own one day keeps me sane. It is a clickable prayer, a symbol of hope.
I have become an unexpected expert in living nomadically over nearly a decade, and from it I’ve learned how flexible humans can be. It is a gift to make a decision about our eventual location after becoming parents, one of the biggest changes of all, and equally a blessing to have the kind of mobility that so many people worldwide cannot access. I cherish our privilege to live liminally for the moment and to feel that we have choice once it is time to move again. Until then, I’ll be clicking on that three-bed near Seven Sisters, wondering whether I could turn the garden shed into my dream writing-and-art studio.
