32nd Request
Dear Barack Obama,
The house finally feels like a real home now. I got the kitchen in order today and started reclaiming the dining room table from the mess that we’ve heaped up around it in the past two weeks. Christina came back from her weekend away with a couch, a sofa chair, a couple suitcases full of clothing and books, the “ugly lamp,” and a good deal of odds and ends sure to make us feel like the place is uniquely ours. There are still plenty of things lying on the floor in semi-distinguished piles such as “return,” “Good Will,” “hang up on the wall,” and “important, but don’t know where it should go” to keep us busy for quite a while, but the place really feels like our own now.
As wonderful as it is to finally have a home together, it’s a little strange to have all this space to ourselves. It isn’t that we have to adjust to living with one another; we’re perfectly acquainted with each other’s quirks. We’ve actually lived together for as long as we’ve been a couple. There’s a joke in the GLBT community that explains this phenomenon. “What does a lesbian bring on a second date? A U-Haul.” And that was us.
After Christina tried to kiss me, I turned away scared (because I had never kissed anyone before and I didn’t know what to do), and I let her kiss me the next night, I asked if I could move in with her. She was my best friend at college and the first person I had ever come out to. I was friends with two of the girls who lived in her apartment, and on friendly terms with the other two–even though I didn’t know them all that well. Since people were always flowing in and out of Christina’s apartment, and the door was always unlocked, I had become accustomed to spending all my time at her place. So much so, in fact, that I’d brought over my sleeping bag and a pillow. Christina and the other girls who lived in her apartment had taken to calling me their “sixth roommate” and joking that the floor space in the middle of the room was my bed. Others who frequently visited the residence regarded me as one of the lucky ones who lived there, and often forgot that I didn’t. So it didn’t come as a huge surprise to Christina when I asked if I could move in with her.
Our story of sharing spaces since then has been a hodgepodge of experiences, made even more messy by occasional punctuations. When our first year of college came to an end and we weren’t ready to part ways, I asked Christina to come out to California with me for the summer. In our sophomore year, we shared a room in the Alliance House and spent Christmas together in my home town. Then, at different points throughout a long summer of being mostly apart, we visited my East Coast relatives for a week, spent a week together in Beloit where Christina was doing her McNair research, and stayed with her family in Michigan for a week. After that, I got a job as an RA and we squeezed ourselves into a traditional 8′ x 12′ dorm room for a semester. When winter break came again, Christina came out to California for the holidays again. Then she went home to spend a month with her family. After that, we met up in Chicago and flew to Pennsylvania to spend a week or so with my grandparents. Then, we went to Uganda for a semester of off-campus study. Upon our return to the US, we visited with my grandparents for another week and then went to Michigan to spent a week with Christina’s family. While we spent most of the summer apart after that, we were reunited fairly soon when we both returned to campus early to be Orientation Leaders for the incoming freshman class. In our senior year, we returned to apartment-style living and shared a place with two friends. After that, we spent the bulk of the summer in Beloit while she helped her advisor with a chapter of her book, flew to California to make wedding preparations, went to Europe, wandered around homeless for a few days, and ended up here, in our very own house.
Although we’ve always lived together, we’ve never had so much space to ourselves before. We’ve day dreamed about sharing a space that was just our own for years, and now we have it. It feels a little strange, naturally, but it’s also feels like we have a real home.
“The bookshelf looks good,” Christina said a moment ago, prompting me to look up from this letter and admire the way she had just arranged the books.
“Oh, yeah,” I said, glancing up at the bookshelf and giving it an appreciative look.
“It looks better from back here,” she hinted.
“Oh, I see what you’re saying. I see.” I got up and went to the opposite end of the room to take in the full view of the bookshelf. I smiled when I saw what she’d done with it. This is someone who’s worked at the college library for four years and knows the Dewey Decimal System by heart. Need the string of digits for Shakespeare or animal husbandry? She’s got you covered. This is someone who’s lusting after an internship with the Library of Congress and admires how much information its complex classification system is capable of handling. So organizing her books by color is what she does to relax and claim the bookshelf as her own, I guess.
“Now it’s really a home,” she said, leaning back to admire her work.
For me, it was the couch. For her, it was the bookshelf. Whether it was bringing things into this space or sharing a space together alone for first time that really made the house a home, it finally is one.
I hope you’ll deliver our home–our family, our marriage–the recognition that it deserves and I hope you’ll do so soon.
Sincerely,
Crystal Alburger
