I interviewed by phone for graduate writing programmes from my car in a grocery store parking lot, because that’s where I lived at the time. Of all the places you can set yourself up, I found grocery store car parks to be the best of all mediocre options. Outside a Schnucks in St Louis, there were always other people waiting in cars, which helped me blend in. Unlike mall lots, there were few police. The only patrolling presence, teenage cart-pushers, preferred to ignore me as much as I did them. At night, the store kept the lot lit – but thankfully, not too well lit, for sleeping was difficult enough in a car too laden with belongings to recline the seat. And, at least until the grocery closed, it was easy to grab a meal. So I’d drive there in the evenings, after showering at the YMCA.
My time in the car was short, considering: not more than a week and a half. It came about because of the sudden end to a long-term relationship, coupled with living in a city far from family and home, which left me thin on choices. I had a nine-to-five job at the time and, each day after work, I filled out tenant applications, but the process had been dragging. I was building the courage to ask a co-worker for a place to stay, dreading the embarrassment and added uncertainty that comes when others discover you aren’t managing well.
I found myself suddenly intimate with the trappings of my old house compressed into my car. Lampshades and suitcases, a bookshelf and piled clothes, books, a djembe, picture frames; all heaped and threatening avalanche. I discovered that I held a hierarchy among the things I owned, and that this hierarchy was strange. Buckled into my passenger seat like driving companions, I kept an accordion; my grandpa’s old notepad inscribed with “Everything’s Just Ducky”; and a taxidermised fox, which I had named T-Bone. I wagered the passenger seat was the safest place in the car, and I needed these possessions safe. In tough times, you learn what’s most important to you. Apparently, it was these.
I knew how fortunate I was. A job, a car and a backseat full of stuff seems more than you deserve when at night others are trudging across that same parking lot to sleep against the storefront. Before the pandemic, more than 500,000 people in the US were recorded as homeless – surely an underestimate, and surely made worse by Covid-19. I for one didn’t report to Housing and Urban Development before moving into a parking lot. Even napping behind a steering wheel, I felt privileged with my grab-bag belongings; as ridiculous as much of that stuff was, it was a collection to be grateful for.
The times I needed to leave my car for work or a meal were always the most stressful. Eventually, when a co-worker – now a friend – took me into his house, I’d sometimes go sleepless, frantic, thinking I’d look out to see my car gone with all my belongings inside. My great-grandmother’s bookshelf, old postcards – even the ridiculous things. They helped me feel like myself.
I had thought I would be good at this. I’m a native of New Orleans: each hurricane season threatens evacuation, and my family and I had plenty of experience leaving belongings behind. When you leave your home, until you know the roof remained secure and flood waters didn’t breach your doors, whatever you bring is what you now own. So we’d pack our photo albums and the smallest mementoes of loved ones long gone. These took space in backseats beside gas cans, emergency roadside kits, toiletries, a couple of days of clothes. Each evacuation reminded us how much of a home can’t be moved: the time spent remodelling a kitchen, the rooms where celebrations were held and a family grew up, the simple feeling of existing in that place. But we knew it was our lives that were important, and nothing more than that.
For Hurricane Katrina, we were lucky. Our house remained standing. Though, like so many New Orleanians, we have friends who lost homes and loved ones, who were evacuated from rooftops by helicopters and could look down on themselves in that moment and see all they had.
Years later, after leaving that Schnuck’s parking lot, I moved across the country to Wilmington, North Carolina and began writing a novel about an orphan who refuses to leave her childhood home and, instead, hides in its walls. In retrospect, I guess the theme makes sense. While working on the novel, Hurricane Florence flooded the highway and turned the city into an island. My fiance and I were evacuated for a month. We spent that time telling each other that if we returned and found our home gone, we’d be OK. Of course, it’s always easier to say it.
With the world around us changing, sea levels rising and storms growing stronger – with the uncertainty of the present, whether it be viruses or evictions or environments rapidly transforming – for many, homes are no certain thing. I’m grateful for what I have, partly because each near miss has required me to re-evaluate what I own. I move through the house, and each possession ignites like a sudden flare. What do I need? What’s vital to me? Of course, it’s nothing. And also, everything.
Girl in the Walls by AJ Gnuse is published on 1 April (4th Estate). To order a copy, go to guardianbookshop.com.
