Home · not home

Home / not home describes Laura’s difficulty finding a place that feels fully hers. Jim’s apartment offers intimacy and a possible shared future, while Tyler’s home and Laura’s family homes carry their own ties without resolving the question of belonging. The concept turns home from a fixed address into a tension between familiarity, memory, and the life Laura is still trying to make.

Jim’s apartment and imagined domesticity

Jim has a key cut for Laura in January, and their plan is for her to move in when they marry. Yet the prospect remains abstract to her: she wonders whether cohabitation would mean contributing to the décor, including posters in clip frames, and admits that she cannot yet see herself living there. She loves Jim’s place, but it does not feel like home.

Instead of treating marriage as an automatic arrival, Laura imagines another arrangement: once she has earned enough, she could rent her own flat opposite Jim’s. They could wave to each other across the road, a scene she associates with Woody Allen and Mia Farrow across Central Park. Even this romantic picture splits in two as she considers whether it might simply be lonely. The imagined closeness depends on keeping separate homes, preserving both connection and distance.

Homes that memory keeps

Tyler’s place does not provide an alternative. Laura says, in effect, that it belongs to Tyler rather than to her: it is Tyler’s home, not Laura’s. The distinction makes clear that friendship and proximity do not by themselves create a sense of being at home.

Laura’s family home is equally complicated. Her old bedroom has been redecorated, and she spent only a few childhood years in Middleton before leaving for Edinburgh and university. Most of her childhood memories belong instead to the house in Crumpsall, where she lived from eight to sixteen. In her mid-twenties, feverish after visits to the doctor and longing for comfort, she sometimes gave taxi drivers directions to Crumpsall, only to realize partway there that she now lived in the other direction. The mistake makes the pull of childhood home physical and recurrent: illness briefly sends her toward the place her child-self still recognizes as home, although her adult life has moved elsewhere.

Belonging without arrival

The motif holds together several different kinds of attachment without making them interchangeable. Laura loves Jim’s apartment, but love does not make it hers; she has a history with her family’s houses, but their rooms and locations have changed; and Tyler’s home remains distinctly Tyler’s. The home she can imagine most clearly may be the separate flat across from Jim’s, but even that image leaves open whether independence would feel romantic or lonely.

A lyric by Hovis Presley helps Laura put the instability into a playful form: wherever she lays her hat is her hat. The joke offers a provisional answer rather than a settled home. Across these scenes, belonging appears less as possession of a particular address than as an unresolved effort to reconcile remembered places, present relationships, and the uncertain shape of an adult life.