Some friends of mine bought a house.

It was their childhood home. It was not their only childhood home and in reality, they probably did not live in it for that long, but it was the first and last home they all lived in together with both parents. It was a beautiful house that loomed large in their family mythology.

I became part of their circle a year or two after they moved from the house. I spent a lot of time in the apartments and houses of each of their parents, and later their own. But for over 30 years I heard stories of the house. Recently, they bought the house back and their mother moved back in and although they live far away they and their spouses spend long weekends in the house restoring it and remaking it. Even as they recreate poses from old photographs they tell stories about the house and their family. Many of the stories are old wounds, covered in protective scabs of humor. Not everything in that house was happy, not everything was good, but it was their childhood home.

My parents still live in my childhood home. I do not think of myself as having had a happy childhood. I mainly think of my childhood as lonely. I know now that it was probably a fairly normal 1970s-80s, suburban childhood. A little stranger and sadder than some, less tragic than many. I was not happy, but I loved my bedroom. In 5th grade I decorated it in rainbows. Two different rainbow themed wallpapers covered opposite walls. I had twin beds with rainbow sheets, matching yellow comforters and shams, and navy blue dust ruffles. I  would sit in my yellow, rainbow filled room and listen to my parents fight. I had a walk in closet painted a deeper yellow than my comforter and I could fit comfortably under the bottom shelf. When my parents’ fighting was at its worst I would sit under the shelf and read. At night, I would lie in bed under my yellow comforter and look out the window at the trees and my rusty jungle gym and write stories about the future in my head. In the stories I lived somewhere else with people who knew me and loved me.

Later, I dreamed about boys and later still, I made out with boys on top of the same yellow comforter. Eventually, I lost my virginity in the same bed and for a few minutes I felt that I had made my dreams come true. If the boy I dreamed about in that bed was actually in the bed, then surely, all my other dreams would also come true. One day I would live in a different, less lonely world.

The day after I graduated from high school I moved out of the house. I moved in with a friend who is now married to another friend, and together with his siblings, they own their childhood home. When after college and a failed attempt to move to LA I briefly moved back to my parents’ house, I did not live in my room, but in the larger room that had been my sister’s. I spent most of the time deeply depressed, rarely leaving the room, until suddenly, I did. I moved to an apartment a few miles away, returning to my old room only a few times, once when recovering from surgery and later when I visited from farther away.

I lived in my parents’ house for 11 years. I have lived in my current house, the only home I’ve ever owned, for almost 15 years.

Still, whenever I have a dream of being at home, it is in my childhood home, in my rainbow room. The last guy I dated before I met my husband told me that sometimes when he couldn’t sleep he pretended he was in his childhood home. In his mind, he walked through the house touching things until he fell asleep. His father had died young and his only memory of him was lying on his chest as a toddler on a warm, summer day. He remembered looking at a glistening glass Coke bottle on the coffee table. The memory troubled him because having been raised by a mother who routinely yelled “Take off your shoes before you walk on my clean floor or I will cut off your legs,” he found it difficult to believe that even a dying husband would be allowed a sweating bottle with no coaster. He worried the memory was false, but still he touched the bottle in his walk through the house. It was the only conversation we ever had that made me think I might love him.

Now, when we go home my husband and I sleep in the basement, once the site of raucous teenage parties, and our children sleep in my old room, no longer covered in rainbows. My mother has claimed the room as her study, or one of her studies and turned my bed into a daybed. She has papered the walls and covered the bed in a deep, rich, tasteful red. This weekend I went home with just my daughter. We listened to soundtracks and cast albums on the drive up and talked about her impending 8th grade graduation. Not for the first time I realized that she is closer in age to my teenage self than I am. Being 14, my daughter wanted the privacy of the basement and so I got to sleep in my room.

She and I visited my friends in their childhood home and I came home and went to sleep in my bed. I looked out the window and thought about how I cover my own wounds in sentiment and wondered what future stories are left for me to write.

I think perhaps for my friends and me our dreams came true and yet nothing has turned out exactly the way we imagined. As we get older I think we realize that’s probably the best outcome anyone can hope for. Maybe this is why some of us are drawn to our childhood homes. It is not a longing to go back, but a longing for a time when we had more certainty about the way forward.