Music

Overall, I think it’s fun, whimsical, playful, and romantic. It’s not the most memorable tune, but I do enjoy hearing it.

Poetry

This would definitely have been a four for me, except for the lyric “instant pleasure dome,” which is absolutely egregious. Might be one of the worst things to call your partner that I’ve ever heard. It unfortunately also makes it harder to share this song with others, as I have in the past, and THAT lyric is what people take away. I might have done:

”you’re my castle and my cabin and my infinite unknown” to remark on the ability of someone you love to always surprise you, but there are many better options than pleasure dome. So, this song loses a whole point over it.

Change

It is pretty much exactly the same throughout. I gave it an extra point for some fun piano parts in there.

Insight

Although this isn’t a unique or novel concept, that the person you love is the only home you need, the song’s attitude of “oh, I’m a lost wanderer, but that’s okay, because with you I have a home” is charming and the sentiment resonates with me.

Good

I love this song and it is one of my favorites.

“You’re my home,” I whisper.

I lay in my bed, phone laying on my chest, your voice coming in on the speaker. You suggest we move cities.

“For how long?”

“Just for a little bit,” you say.

Well, just for a little, I whisper, this time only to myself. That night, I’m laying in bed and staring off into the distance, picturing a life without my apartment, in a new place, a place that would be completely foreign to me.

My apartment is on the second floor of the building, my favorite floor to be on (not too many steps to climb, but not on the ground floor either). A radiator which I love is loudly making noises in the corner of the room (it was a requirement for my apartment since I’m allergic to central heating). I can see my cat Claire curled in her basket by the radiator, her favorite spot. I enjoy joking about how the radiator is her lover, and they’re devastatingly in love, but can never touch. I see her sleeping in the glow of the sunset lamp that I ordered on Amazon two years ago to get rid of the horrible overhead lighting. I find every detail surrounding me in this moment to be intentionally put there by me.

but

you’re my home.

I guess – it can be anywhere you are.

You are my home,
the mornings sleeping in, waking at random intervals to confirm each other’s presence, an acknowledgement of the mutual here.

You’re my home in the moments dozing off, losing consciousness.

You’re my home, your hands so familiar to mine, as if they were carved from my inverse. I reach for them even in my absentminded moments, more comfortable with you than in my natural state of rest.

You’re my home, my head on your shoulder.

You’re my home, your laugh an echo to what I’m saying.

I play the song for you and I can tell that you don’t hear any of it, you’re most likely tuning it out out of your dislike for Billy Joel. I listen to it every day thinking of you.

You’re my home in the familiarity of the creases around your eyes, the knowing glances, the search for approval in my features.

Maybe more than my apartment, more than the life I’ve built alone, my home.

My hallway decorated by my neighbor, the smell of your clothes, the shape of my pillow, the warmth of your smile, the various colors of my bathroom wall from the various leaks, the way we sit in silence, present with each other.

A decision heartbreaking in either regard, and one I will, fortunately or unfortunately, get to avoid ever making.

Both sides addled with potential for regret.

“Well, it sounds like it could be possible. I’d want to be with you, no matter where we were.”

Agreeing to this will be particularly heartbreaking later, not for the loss of you and me, and not for what could have been, us living in some far off place, but in the sacrifice of the self in the face of the us.

I sit on my couch watching the candles on the living room table. The morning I bought the table it was unusually cold. It was also my first morning completely free of nicotine in eight years. We took my roommate’s car to the Facebook marketplace meetup and loaded it into the car. On the way back we stopped at Home Depot to replace the garish gold handles.

In another world, this table, with its new handles and its long history, sits in the house of its next owner, and I’m hundreds of miles away, looking at a table someone else picked out.

I take everything off the top, wipe down the surface, and organize the table the way I want it to look. I smile, happy to be near it.

“You’re my home,” I whisper.