moonsand

There was a moment I knew I was safe. It was yesterday, and soft jazz was playing one room over. The light was dim and my new bedroom felt like a space I made sense in. Everything moves in nonstop, senseless motion nowadays. I am unsure if time has been going by faster or if I’m just finally paying attention. Either way, I can’t seem to look directly at the people I love without getting dizzy. 

But this time, I was in my bed, sinking deep into a mattress topper that smelled of cellophane, looking even deeper into a pair of warm, brown eyes. Everything turned to touch, day clothes in a pile beside us. My wrists were pinned down to each corner of my bed when I said, “You can do anything you want to me.” Anything you want to me, the words just rolled out. I never speak that way. People let the people they love hurt them and bite them and yank them around, what made me any different? 

He froze. “Close your eyes,” he said, and I shut them so tight, but all he wanted to do was kiss my two closed eyelids and each delicate lash, one at a time. 

As I write this, my mother is writing too, but in England. My father is reading, but in Texas. My friends are all spread out, some in California, one in Costa Rica, one in Japan, some across the hall. A young girl I’ll never meet sleeps in my childhood bedroom, and the house after that was uprooted, boarded up and broken down. 

I always knew this would happen. I knew that “Home” would turn into something bendy and twisted and moldable, just like Moonsand. I realize how much of “Home” is synonymous with safety. Security and familiarity. Home is saying, “You can do anything you want to me” with your wrists pinned down. 

Home kisses you on the nose. 

– 

Homesickness follows me from Texas to Syracuse. Perhaps it is because my family is particularly makeshift. Being an only child may be one of the most misunderstood and misrepresented experiences. Being an only child with divorced parents who are still friends is something else entirely, especially when both parents are in separate relationships, their new partners are also friends, and everyone is an artist of some sort. It was instilled in me at a young age that family is chosen and love is larger than anything else. 

Our first house was on a street called Ethel, nestled in the valley of Los Angeles. I can only access it through photographs and reconstructed memories. The second lay tucked into the hills of Austin, Texas. My parents were married then, and every moment seemed to shimmer with vast, saturated color. The third house was the odd-one-out in a cul-de-sac, a backdrop

to middle school growing pains. My little family unraveled and spread out around the world. The fourth house, a little ranch home on a street called Juniper, was shaped by the howls of coyotes, the intimacy of mother-daughter, and the monotony of quarantine. 

The fifth was just off Sunset Boulevard. There was always a tent on the corner, shadowed by a billboard, accompanied by the distant wail of sirens. The sixth house was a flat in St. Albans, a cathedral city right outside of London. The seventh was in Syracuse, where I lived with six girls. We strung lights from the ceiling and drank wine on the floor, and one day, a massive raccoon fell through our ceiling and landed in the shower. 

– 

Fluorescent, overhead light washed out the second grade classroom. Every child in the room woke up in their own bed, dressed themselves, ate a different breakfast in a different kitchen, hugged a different mother or father or nanny goodbye in a different car. 

In the corner on a snotty carpet of the alphabet, sat a bucket of toy cars, a shelf of picture books, and a pit of Magic Moonsand. I perched my small body on a stool by the sand pit, and each day during playtime, I would build a beautiful castle. But by the next afternoon, my castle was always flattened out. The bulldozer of night and day and time would destroy my construction. I used to wonder if one day, the castle would remain intact. It never did. 

Between the lines of the picture books, I would write my own stories. I would write fairy tales on cardboard boxes and diary entries on my hands. My second grade report card reads, “Audrey has been encouraging her peers to write stories, and she reads her own stories out loud to the class. 

Perhaps that is home – that skinny thread of consistency that never breaks or trembles, hurtling through the turbulence of time passing. My essence. The thing that has always needed to do this, translate images and imaginings into narratives, the same way the adult chemist used to make potions from honeysuckle in the backyard, or the adult lawyer would put their stuffed animals to trial. 

When writing about the gap between truth and memory, Sally Tisdale describes, “a pearl of self traveling intact through time.” Maybe we all live there, in our little pearls of self. But Tisdale doesn’t even believe in that. She says that we name and manufacture our identity pearls, and in reality, “we are each watching what seems a ceaseless parade of selves.” 

In child psychology, therapists will often have the child draw a house and study the image they conjure up. Psychologically, the house the child draws is supposed to reflect how they feel about their life at home, its colors and shape describing emotional undertones the child cannot yet articulate for themselves. A bright house that takes up the whole page indicates feelings of abundance, while a small house drawn in the corner of the page in black ink with no windows

indicates isolation. In Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, the house is described as the child’s “first cosmos… the child’s earliest universe… a microcosm of security and wonder” that forms the foundation for their later perceptions of space and belonging. 

Sure, the house is a cosmos, but how many galaxies can we stretch our bodies through before each orbital root is untethered, and we realize we are floating through infinite blackness? The childhood house, the young adult’s first apartment, the college dorm, the tent in Hollywood, the motel, the couchsurfer, the trailer, the guest room, the break-ups, the friendships fizzling out, the grief, the chameleon personas, the skin and the cells in our bodies regenerating, over and over again. – 

I am still unsure about the bounds of Home. I question how far its walls can stretch. Can home be a familiar voice, a look in the eye, or a kiss on the lashes? Can home be a box of miscellaneous items that watched me grow up, or a castle in a pit of a classroom I’ll never return? 

The only conclusion that sits still without dissolving is that Home is made of Moonsand. It can flatten and melt, last a decade or a morning. It can take on many shapes and wispy silhouettes. But no matter how many castles I built or LIFE Magazines I paste to popcorn walls in new cities, no matter how many promises exchanged, messages sent, letters signed, no matter how many keys twisted into mysterious locks, mattresses slept, closets stuffed, it will always be my hand on the other side of the dark, ceaseless pit, feeling out the ridges and curves, building, reexamining, and building up again.

Audrey Valentine Weisburd is a writer from Austin based in New York. Her writing has appeared in Expat Press, Dream Boy Book Club, Maudlin House, Flaunt, Paste, and Impulse Magazine. Audrey likes to explore themes of home, love, dreams, technology, connection, and disconnection.