Making my Mark

I made my mark the other day. On the wall. First in pencil, then with a drill.

It was a big moment for me. I’d been putting it off for a while, afraid that I would do it wrong. Not really sure how to do it in the first place. Now I’d just about figured it out and there was no point procrastinating any longer.

My flatmate Jan looked on as I lifted the drill to the pencilled dot on the wall.

‘I’m scared,’ I said.

He laughed. ‘Shall I do it for you?’

‘No! I want to do it. I don’t want to be completely incompetent.’

‘Go on then,’ he said. ‘Give it some power!’

The drill roared, and I bored a hole in the wall. The wall remained standing, and so did I.

After I’d hung up the shelf, I proudly showed off my handiwork to my other two flatmates, Steffi and Melina. ‘It’s wonky,’ they told me helpfully.

Drilling a hole in a wall is very permanent. You can’t undrill. It means: I intend to stay here for a while. The more surprising thing, perhaps: I want to stay here for a while.

This is a new feeling for me that I am still trying to process.

I guess it’s not surprising that I want to stay in one place for a little longer, having lived in three countries and had seven different ‘homes’ in the last two years. I would say it’s not unreasonable to desire a little more stability. At least for now… Wanderlust is chronic, and I have no doubt that it will return before long.

Thankfully, the new flat that I moved into just before Christmas meets my high standards. I love the space: high ceilings, huge windows, a large open-plan communal area. My window faces south and I bask in the light as I read for university, sit in seminars or teach English. Yes, it’s all online.

We even have a garden. OK, it doesn’t belong to us – you and our neighbours would probably call it a ‘park’; but seeing as we live on the ground floor and the house backs directly onto this wonderful green space, we consider it to be our garden. Over the past few months, my flatmates and I have variously used it for sledging, cross-country skiing, a short walk between video calls, and hula hooping.

The downside of living on the ground floor is that when the blinds are up (to enjoy the light), we sometimes feel like we’re the attractions in a zoo. Still, it gives us a certain celebrity status:

‘Are you from the student flat?’ a wide-eyed child asks me as I walk across the square in front of the house.

‘Well, we’re not all students…’ He clearly does mean my flat though: all the other flats in the new-build complex are occupied by young families. I nod: ‘Yes, I live there.’

‘Cooool. I want to live there when I’m older.’

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