Photo by Sunyu Kim from Pexels

Day at a Hostel

Because someday I’ll want to remember the rootless chapters of my life

There are many flavors of homelessness. I’ve experienced some variant of it in the U.S., China, and Germany (…also Spain and Portugal, if you count the weeks I spent on the Iberian Peninsula when a Berlin sublease ended and I discovered that hostel-hopping outside of Germany was more affordable than staying in it). In each of those cases, my reasons were economic: I didn’t have enough for a place I could call “my own,” so I couch-surfed with friends or rented bunks in dorms. I had “homes,” but they weren’t mine. Most of the time they weren’t even homes at all. These were minimal-privacy, minimal-personal-space, tenuous arrangements where something like a group booking could claim the bunk I rented, or a lovers spat could render a spare bed (or couch) abruptly unavailable to my hapless, homeless ass.

Then about two years ago, a dream came true: I secured a housing contract and a freelancer visa in Germany. With these documents and a stable income, I figured the rootless days were over. But I was wrong. Because last week, an emergency (read: attack) in my apartment left me homeless again.

Since then, I’ve been bouncing around between friends’ apartments and hostel dorms. To be honest, despite the circumstances, “living” in a hostel again is making me…