I felt sad for weeks in anticipation. The fridge, the bedroom, the bathroom were taken care of slowly, one minor shift or disappearance at a time, as we prepared for the guests’ arrival. They had booked our apartment in Rome for five nights on a platform that allows you to stay in another person’s home — either through a direct home swap, or indirectly by way of a credits system that allows you to book a home at a later date. No money is ever exchanged. The platform says we are 250,000+ members in 155 countries. It promotes a global community “built on trust.”
The instructions our guests received when they reserved our home on the platform said they were welcome to enjoy my booze and guitars. Volunteering them felt better than worrying about them tampering with my cherished belongings. I hid my synths and effect boxes behind a wall of sweaters in the closet. We put a sponge mattress cover over the mattress and under the fresh bedsheet and hoped they wouldn’t uncover it and see the blood stains from my partner’s painful periods. It was a thorough and intrusive operation, different to the kind of tidying you do before hosting friends or family for a weekend.
We were exposing our home, and ourselves, to strangers for reasons that had nothing to do with love or human solidarity. We were doing it to lighten the financial load of our next trip. My partner disagreed — she felt that it was also going to be an interesting, and pleasant, experience, that it implied, in fact, some form of solidarity. Solidarity between people who must be creative and cooperative if they want to afford to go on vacation now that inflation is gradually pricing the middle class out of its habitual comforts.
She tends to have the right hunch about these things. I mean experiences that involve other people — community activities, political engagement. So I welcomed the dissonance between her curiosity and my anxiety. I was aware that I had thought of the physical walls to this one-story home as boundaries for my vulnerable self. If diagnoses can be trusted (and who knows, really), I’ve had three schools of psychotherapy state that some of my bad experiences as a child have left me with no personal boundaries. This apartment where I’ve established my adult life is the only barrier I have. I don’t entertain guests, ever. My wife does, and when they come over, I go hide in my room, where I enjoy hearing the way her laugh melts into her friends’.
But even if this home my partner and I lovingly put together over many years was the first place where I felt safe, that doesn’t mean, I reasoned, that I couldn’t try and separate myself from it just a little bit. Maybe I could stop considering these walls to be my ultimate protection and let some life in.
When we left for our vacation, I tried not to think about how strangers would be living in my home while I wasn’t there. Still, I was in a sorry state. A person we trusted would be welcoming them. My wife handled all communication with this person and with the strangers as they browsed the contents of our bathroom cabinet and slept in our beds.