"Welcome home," I sang, trying it on. I was planted on my boyfriend's floor, which, that morning, had become my floor. Surrounded by boxes of my clothes, I was flushed, intoxicated by the potential to arrange my stuff and life in this space, to co-create my first-ever shared apartment. Sure, I wasn't crazy about the blue-lit bachelor bathroom or the bronze cow door-knocker, but Jon's flat had big windows, large rooms, and I flung open cupboards with increasingly delirious abandon.

Until. A drawer oozing ticket stubs. A cupboard full of cassette tapes. Pens, pens, pens. "Jon!" I screamed. "What is this?" I frantically pulled on doors, scanned closets. A shelf of ancient documents. A hidden plastic bag collection. "Jon!" How could I not have noticed this stuff before? What else lay in the crevices, stuffed into corners of our lives? My heart raced, my thumbs pulsed. I wanted to bolt.

***

I grew up with a hoarder mother in a house filled with thousands of VHS tapes and tuna cans, heaps of objects that formed physical and emotional barriers between us. My report cards were forever lost among frayed blankets and newspaper flyers. Mom's bed was stacked with old clothes. I couldn't reach her if I had a nightmare. I felt alone, unseen. Mom, who'd been born in 1945 on my Jewish grandparents' journey from Siberian work camps back to war-ravaged Poland, a refugee before she knew what home was, was depressed and worked at a government job, leaving before I woke up and asleep on the sofa when I came home. She loved me as she could, but was increasingly moody, paranoid and unreliable. Always on guard, I hid among the metastasizing clutter.

At 19, I left home, seeking order and cleanliness. I imagined that without objects dragging me down, I'd feel calm, attractive, and open to love. I aimed for the opposite of Mom: empty spaces, all white, reduced furnishings (Who needs coffee tables?!). I became a militant minimalist, fleeing farther and farther from my family home. At 24, I found myself in sophisticated England, working at art galleries, my life pallid and pristine. The opposite of my Yiddishy roots, a full 180, I'd muse, discussing critical art and interior design with British accents.

There I met Evan, a professor in his mid-40s who taught me not only about international sociological trends but dear domesticity. He had his own flat and was obsessed with cooking and decorating, showing my dazzled, youthful eyes thread counts, café presses, single-origin herbs. Our whole relationship was based on architecture. We spent weekends strolling through London, looking for new homes for each of us, me giddy while he lectured about Le Creusets and structural walls. I rented my first solo flat, four rooms — minuscule but mine. Evan helped me schlep in my few boxes and black, wiry Ikea chairs. I bought nothing, removed items from the gray and blond-wood surfaces and tied the beaded curtains into crisp geometric patterns, feeling sexy and slick. On Evan's moving day, I arrived at the crack of dawn to help him lug Oriental rugs. "The mover thinks I should marry you," he said afterward, in his new living room. Marriage? I was in my 20s! But I turned away and smiled.

It was a mere two weeks later that we sat opposite each other at an Indian restaurant. "It's just not working out," he said and my stomach heaved. He'd started a new affair, left me for a woman nearly twice my age who had matching plate sets and throw pillows, who owned stuff that made him "feel comfortable." I was horrified, threw down my biryani so the rice pounced off the plate in all directions. I ran home, seething at having been cuckolded. I was ashamed — I was supposed to have been the young chick, cool, hip, flawless without wrinkles and clutter.

But once my anger dissipated, I recalled how Evan had asked me to buy new comforters and bigger mugs. His requests had come out as joking pleas. I'd dismissed them as materialistic and trivial, but clearly, they'd been important. I'd wrongly equated maturity and beauty with emptiness. Just because I removed obstacles in front of me, it didn't mean I was looking at, or listening to, others. By purging material things, I wasn't eradicating barriers to intimacy — I was building new kinds of walls.

I was left with Evan's legacy: my new abode. Alone, I added color — a round red rug, a sparkling pink scarf that I draped as a curtain. I stuck a sunshine decal Evan had bought me on my window and it splattered an orange light across my ash kitchen. I felt proud of my artistic touches, feeling ownership of my space. When my friend Claire needed a place to stay as she apartment-hunted, I was happy to pull out my futon and show her how to make a cream sauce like Evan had showed me as if I was a doyenne of domesticity. But as days passed, Claire's presence in my tiny space amplified. She hung her gym clothes on the doorknob. She never bought toilet paper. She read my books and I watched cracks spider along the spines.

I submerged my feelings, stayed out late, pretended I was asleep in the morning, and email-inquired about her moving plans. When she finally left, I erased her messages, recovering my stretched-out boundaries. But Claire didn't have it. "This is ridiculous," she came over to find me. "I love you and insist on talking to you."

Her candor jerked me awake. I agreed to go out for coffee. She asked me straight up: "Why are you being so cold?"

I stared at my latte, the powder swirl a churning tornado of change. For years, I withdrew, afraid to show anger or react erratically like Mom, avoiding asking for what I needed in fear it wouldn't be available. But when Claire called me out for distancing from her, I had the opportunity to explain myself. "I was upset at how you treated my apartment," I blurted. "I needed you to clean."

"Sorry, I had no idea you were sensitive to space." She passed me half her muffin, as if no drama had transpired at all.

I was flabbergasted. As long as I expressed myself calmly, people would listen, and the world wouldn't fall apart. The way to intimacy, I saw, watching the crumbs trickle down her chin, was to focus on honesty in my relationships and to listen to what my partner — and myself — really needed.

So when, soon after turning 30, my new boyfriend Jon invited me to his parents' house and I was immediately confronted with a human-size pile of junk mail and three Volvos from the 1980s, I did not flee or go cold, but followed Jon's lead, astounded by the coincidence, laughing at the flock of Art Deco glasswear ("in case we have 60 guests over for dinner!"). After 30 years of keeping my embarrassing childhood completely secret, I exploded with the truth. "My mom collects laundry bins! Rolling luggage!"

"I can't wait to see her house" Jon replied, to my delight. Weeks later, he visited my parents' duplex. Among the mess, he found an antique wood table, valuable, solid. For once, a boy I could bring home. When my lease expired, Jon asked me to move into his. I'd worked so hard to make my own walls, could I bear to share them — and in someone else's space? But comforted by Jon's firm insistence, I felt ready to take a chance. We used the Volvos to move my carefully collected stashes, and planned the color scheme for our new, shared sheets. I was buzzing, busy unpacking, and then — the drawers.

***

Jon came running. "What is it?"

"What is this?" I gestured at my finds.

"I love music," he explained. "I can get rid of those pens." He threw one in the trash right there. "Until now, I didn't have to make room. But I can."

The trick to escaping the problems that plagued me in childhood was not to do a 180 — but to find my own way of handling feelings, conflict and relationships. I thought of Claire, of Evan, of being honest with others and myself. I watched Jon digging through his desk, trying hard to give me room to breathe.

"Thank you," I said. "Do you think we could make built-ins to stack my clothes?" I could negotiate shared space, lose some control of my surroundings — but I did need a pocket of privacy within our union.

"No problem," Jon tossed a box of mini-boxes.

I had to change too. And so, when he turned up the indie rock guitar solos on his stereo, I let them grace our shared airwaves — for a bit.

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