For however long we are here
Photo credit: Marianne Møllmann 2026
We are entering the last month in the temporary apartment we rented sight unseen, when we moved to Berlin last year. As I look around the now familiar rooms, I marvel at how easy it has been for us to feel at home. We fell in love with the high ceilings and bright coloured kitchen-tiles from the day we moved in. Not all elements are equally functional (see: randomly placed electric outlets, couches that long since went lumpy and stained), but the overall effect is cheerful and sanctuary-like, even when the skies are gray. I don’t think I have had one bad morning in this place.
Of course, feeling at home is not just about colours and calm. It is about familiarity. Comfort. It is about the presence of people we love. I recently spent a week in New York City, visiting my adult child, spending time with friends, and in places that used to be part of my daily routine and life. I no longer remember when Brooklyn began to feel familiar to the point of comfort. Certainly it took much longer than a year. So maybe this sense of being at home in Berlin is about this apartment and not yet the city itself.
Then again, I didn’t just live in New York City. I parented a child from infant to adulthood, I divorced, dated, and remarried, I launched and closed a business, I did 15+ years of therapy, I became a yoga teacher, a coach, and, importantly, myself. New York City is perhaps more a site of homecoming for me than home itself. I wonder if this is both its continued allure and the reason I no longer need it at all: I am already here, with me, wherever I am.
I am telling myself all of this on a morning of such glorious spring-beauty, it feels almost impossible to contain. Deep blue skies. Sunshine. Leaves that are changing from chartreuse to true green. Ahead of me is a month of much packing, travel, and commotion, some of which sure to be unplanned. And so this last month in our temporary home will be much less than that for me. Looking at it through the lens of nights-in-situ, I really only have two weeks left, if that.
This is the conclusion I needed to get to, I now know: none of us knows how much time we have left, in a place, in a home, in a life. The goal must be to return home, always, to these bodies and this breath, for however long we are here.
