“I don’t have the remote” I screamed to my mother after frantically moving layers of pillows and blankets feeling extremely victimized that I was accused of doing such a thing as losing the remote my mum screamed back to me “ Well you had it last”.

40 minutes later I’m still but while looking for the remote but I’m also looking for my will to live while my mother goes on about how she missed the very crucial minutes of Emmerdale and somehow the remote has become the most important thing in our lives, our destinies are determined on if we find this very object and while my mum is still screeching on about the colossal amounts of tv she’s missing I’m wondering how we got to this very moment.

We got the call that we were moving into a room in a Travelodge in Stratford on the 10th of January it was midday and quite cold outside, I remember that after the call ended I quickly walked outside of my auntie’s house (formally known as my own) while trying to hold back tears about once having my own room to now living in a room with two other people and two cats.

By month three of endless calls to the Waltham forest council we were still met with the same cold response of there are currently no homes amidst a housing crisis or even better no response at all,and as I spoke to more and more people within my temporary accommodation and they told me their horror stories from their councils the more I snare at the sight of luxury apartments being built or the empty promises of more social housing, being given by a government that has done nothing to solve this. And after the 4th month, any other feelings of loss and confusion were completely bombarded by these colossal feelings of anger and frustration that my family and millions of others have been forced to enter a darkened system in a country that serves nothing and no one.

So now as I get back to my exhausting search for a remote, one of the only things me and my family own I feel an abundance of regret and yearning for a better future which involves my mother searching the remote herself in our living room,and I can live peacefully in my own room without having to be accused of such terrible things.

 This search for remote make me realise how much a yearn for a better future and mourn my old life through these objects, as I fold my clothes I yearn to put them back into a dresser instead of a suitcase as I do my makeup I yearn to put them back into a vanity instead of a dusty makeup bag and as my search for the remote comes to an end I yearn for a day that my mum calls me from upstairs to help her find it instead of accusing me of losing it.

I want to say this whole experience has enlightened me, that it has been a spiritual experience that has made me see the power in community and that you can truly find a home in a source outside of a space that you inhabit. I found a home in the movies I watch, the music I experience and the people I surround myself with and while that is true that feeling wore off after the first month.

And now after five months later of repetitive email responses, thousands of calls to the council ,endless trips to the laundrette and the constant everything happens for a reason conversations, to be frank this experience has not been a lesson it’s been a shit time. This journey has filled me with an abundance of anger and has left me with nowhere to put it,but somehow as the months go by and I get wearier I remind myself that like everything this will pass and when it does I can feel validated in the fact that it taught me nothing but yet I still pushed passed it to get to something. 

I’m still not allowed to use the remote by the way.