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“Home Is a Hard Drive in My Brain” by Nuala Sanchez

Still image from home video, courtesy of the author.

I think about being a child.

I think about using the landline to call my best friend’s house. I can hear her mother answer and I ask nicely if she can come over.

I think about looking out the window in the evening and seeing the headlights of my dad’s car pulling into the driveway. My mother tells me to set the table.

I think about pushing the cart at the grocery store while my mom shops. I can taste strawberry Häagen-Dazs ice cream.

I think about waking up in the morning. I can hear footsteps descending the stairs and I know who they belong to.

And now, I am far away. My hair has grown, my skin is paler, my fingers have tapered.

Sometimes I’ll happen upon a familiar smell, in a friend’s apartment, on a stranger’s jacket, and feel myself transported. To somewhere I know well but can’t quite place. And for a small moment I am a child again.

I like to close my eyes and walk around the house. I open every cabinet and every drawer. I’m not looking for anything, I just like to know everything is in its place. Hair ties in the drawer to the left of the bathroom sink. Aluminum foil in the third drawer by the oven. My mother’s wedding dress in her closet. Batteries. Napkins. Band-aids. My ballet slippers.

I make as much noise as possible. I pull a chair out from the table to hear it screech against the floor. I shake a bottle of vitamins. Flip through pages of a coffee table book. Turn on the shower.

I switch the latch and open the back door. Let it slam behind me. Skid down the concrete steps. Standing in the grass, looking up at the oak trees. A canopy of leaves covering the sky.

An ocean of green ivy at my ankles. Wobbly brick steps lead deeper into the yard. I look down at my feet as I maneuver through.

Thick red rope tied onto a plywood two by four. Hooks wedged into the overhanging tree branch. My dad built this swing for me when I was five.

I turn back to the house. The sun has started to set and through the window I see my father turn on a lamp in the living room. I look to the window of my mother’s office. She sits in front of her computer, blue light glowing onto her skin. She switches off the screen and swivels out of her chair. The back door swings open and my dad calls out to me. Dinner’s ready.

I open my eyes. In front of me is the swing again. The piece of wood now coated with a thick layer of ash, the red rope faded and tattered. It’s the only thing I still recognize. There was once a fence that separated our property from our neighbors behind us. Now I can see all the way to the next street. A white pick-up truck drives by.

Looking at the house, a strange skeleton stands before me, made up of steel beams indicating the separation of rooms. The oak trees, black and wiry. Everything has become the same color. Even the same texture.

I can hear my own breath exhale. It gets caught inside my mask and swims up to my goggles, fogging my vision. Looking down at my feet, I trudge back up the broken path.

In between the steel frames, I see the white silhouette of my father in his hazmat suit. He lowers himself through the floor beams into the cavernous pit of rubble. I crouch by the window as he sifts through.

It becomes a search for old curiosities. My dad uncovers something from the ash and carefully places it in my hands. A vase. A mug. A bowl covered in tiny cracks, but still intact. An archaeological dig of our past life.

I have been asked if there is one thing I miss most. An item from the house I wish we had saved. But when I think about taking one thing it feels like ripping a page out of a book.

Home was an entire wall of bookshelves. There were books lining the walls of the living room, of my bedroom, beneath the coffee table. Of painters, photographers, filmmakers, historians.

Home was a long hallway of photographs. Of my grandparents and old city maps. Of pictures my dad shot and developed in his darkroom.

Home was the mountains. Seeing them get closer as we drove home. Watching them turn purple as the sun set. From the kitchen window they felt so near you could almost reach out and touch them.

My dad and I collect our findings and load them into the trunk of the car. We peel off our hazmat suits and gloves and sit in the car for a moment. Parked in the driveway, we stare out at the house.

He begins to imagine what a new home might look like on this same plot of land. Something small and simple. Creative ways to be more sustainable and use new materials. Making sure we still have a view of the mountains.

As we look out at the house, two little birds float down from the avocado tree. In tandem, they fly towards the wide opening in the steel beams, where the window to the living room once was. Seamlessly they fly into the living room and out through the back window into the yard.

My dad drives away and in the passenger seat I close my eyes again.

I return to the house. All of the cabinets and drawers had been opened and so I carefully close them. I take stock of their contents before closing each one. Rubber bands, potato chips, film stock, notebooks. The sun has set, I dim the lights. Testing my memory again, I imagine each light switch, on and off, on and off.

I think about the two little birds. I see them fly through the living room again. Through my bedroom and the bathroom. It’s theirs now.

My dad continues driving through LA traffic. Eventually he is driving me to the airport. My flight back to New York. The city of my separate life.

Weeks later I am standing in the corner of a gallery space in Brooklyn. A show that had taken me weeks to organize. A room of projections showing my mother’s work. I wish she was beside me and not on the other side of the country.

In my pocket, I feel my phone buzz every few minutes. Venmo donations to my hometown as guests arrive.

Playing on the screen is a dancer my mother had choreographed. She’s in our front yard, moving around the bamboo and the avocado trees. The bright blue front door just behind her.

To a friend next to me I whisper, It’s all right there. She smiles, So great you have the videos.

And she’s right. I am lucky for the well of evidence to my memories. But what I meant really was it’s all still there. We see it projected across the wall, but it is also forever inside my head.

Inside my head, I have every birthday party.

I have every fight with my parents. Every time I cried in the shower. Every Christmas morning.

I have every iteration of the house. The different couches and dining room chairs. Every crazy color I painted the walls of my room.

Inside my head, there is a child. In some ways she is me, but in many ways she is not. And I am lucky to have her memories.


Still image from home video, courtesy of the author.

Nuala Sanchez is a director, writer, and photographer originally from Altadena, CA and currently based in Brooklyn, NY.