Other People's Houses

I've spent all my adult life living in other people's houses. Renting temporary spaces that I've always done the most to to make mine. Only hanging pictures where there's already a hole in the wall. Placing my cushions on couches that don't belong to me.

The first was a studio apartment in St Kilda. It was somewhat charmless, with white tiled floors. But it was cheap and was furnished, and we were only there for the summer.

I tried to separate the sleeping area from the living room with an IKEA curtain patterned in a colourful bunting print - bunting was all the rage in 2009 - but the hooks I bought weren't strong enough, and it often fell to the ground in the night.

There was a balcony overlooking a main road and the much-needed-in-the-Australian-summer pool. I bought a desk I really shouldn't have, seeing as we were only there a few months but I couldn't imagine not having a desk to write at. It felt so grown-up to have an apartment.

Next was a beautiful 1960s unit with a floor-to-ceiling window looking out to the museum. It was close to my friend Ruth's gift shop, and I would often walk down Parnell Road to her little boutique and do my university homework at a desk around the corner from her counter. That was probably the best part about living there, being so close to her. I would model the store's sunglasses in photos for her website and watch the shop for her when she was out of town. The apartment was fabulous, the relationship not so much. After less than a year, we split up and moved out.

Oh, the city apartment with Mary! Rented from our beloved Peter, who only charged us what we could afford, and left a Kit Kat in the mailbox when he collected our fortnightly rent in cash.

We lived above the then Whitcoulls, now Farmers on Queen Street. It was the kind of place you could only live in with your best friend because your bedroom didn't have full walls. My mezzanine room allowed me to learn over and talk to Mary while she was in the kitchen making breakfast.

We threw so many parties that they got smaller and smaller due to their exhausting regularity. We covered the indoor tree with twinkle lights and bought matching flower fairy dinnerware. We ate cheese and crackers for dinner more often than not, and would have serious meetings about the bookstore/coffee shop we were going to open in an old villa, where we'd play movies on a projector on a bedsheet hanging from the trees in the garden. This is where I wrote my first play. We had a reading with friends in our living room.

Then there was the studio in a garden in Grey Lynn. The walls were a cool Karen Walker-branded pink paint. The bathroom was separated by a curtain. I loved having my own space, but I didn't love that my clothes got mouldy in the wardrobe, and the walls were often wet with condensation. I pinned sheer fabric into the window panes to give me privacy. Cotton lace fabric from my job at Widdess.

When Alex and I moved to New York, our first sublease was six weeks in Washington Heights. A one-bedroom apartment owned by a guy who was going on tour in the Donna Summer musical. Subleasing is the perfect living situation for nosy people. I tried to piece the man's life together from the photographs on his fridge, analysing his potential personality via his bookcase. Washington Heights is the perfect place to live when you first get to New York, because it is safe and boring and close to Central Park.

Once we'd acclimatised (ie once I no longer was scared of crossing the street), we set our sights on neighbourhoods that matched our preference of charm and grunge.

One of my favourite places we've ever lived was our next. A studio in Crown Heights. The bathroom had pale yellow and black tiling, and a deep bathtub that I'd escape to every night after working at a high-end clothing store in the West Village that I didn't feel cool enough to be in. All of our New York homes belonged to actors because it was LA pilot season. Plus, we're playwrights, so kinship came easily.

I was often surprised by the mutual trust that occurred with these sublets. With this one, we never even met the original tenant, just spoke on the phone. To trust someone with your home, your belongings, the place where you feel most safe, was rather a moving thing.

I loved this apartment because there were plays everywhere, and the man we were leasing from clearly cared so much about his home. It wasn't flashy or full of expensive things, but everything had been placed with care and attention. Fairy lights framed the bedroom window. Stacks of plays in those Samuel French bright colours were in pretty stacks on different shelves.

Then we really hit the jackpot. An incredible 2-bedroom place right by Prospect Park. The large main window was filled with plants that I was terrified I wouldn't look after properly. When we first went to view the place, the actor showed us his bookshelves, one solely for poetry, another for plays. There was a corner of the room where he did his yoga, lined with different musical instruments. He put an embroidered sarong over the television when he wasn't using it.

New York was the place where I learned that there's more than one way to be an adult. Often in New Zealand, I feel like I'm seen as a failure or a person with a severe case of arrested development. Here, if you don't have a child or a house, many see you as a purposeless fool.

But New York had adults living all kinds of rich, fulfilling lives that didn't involve parenting or owning property. This felt like its own kind of culture shock, one that I welcomed with wide-eyed curiosity.

When the pandemic hit, we rushed home in complete despair, but knowing we were lucky to have such a safe place to escape to. We stayed in my parents' studio, a former church hall, for two weeks, then shifted to a friend's house in Pt Chevalier. It was beautiful and sunny, and I could run to the beach. I remember one time, after a run, I ran straight into the water in my clothes. I wasn't sure what the COVID restrictions said about swimming, but I've never been able to be by an ocean and not get in.

Because of the pandemic, many hotels were either being used for quarantine or sitting empty. I found one online that was renting their opulent rooms out for a fraction of the usual cost. We went from the hotel room to a studio apartment, then to a two-bedroom place on a higher floor, all in the same hotel. Now we have a beautiful, large space, with a long balcony facing north. All day sun and a view of the ocean.

Then one day, we became the people subleasing our home to a fellow artist. While we spent four months living in other people's Balinese villas, a young woman in town for an arts festival lived in our home.

While we were away, I wondered what she made of us. What did our bookcase, our paintings, our objects tell her?

Perhaps she didn't live her life with the intense curiosity I did. Perhaps it was just a place to stay, a roof over her head, not that deep.

But if she were like me, the kind of person in whose eyes everything had the potential to be that deep, I hope she found living in another person's home to be as transformative and fortifying as I did. I hope that through living in a new place, she saw the potential of her life.

I hope she felt herself expand, and expand, and expand.