My Zillow.

I am looking for a house with a glass roof. The master bedroom ceiling should be open so when I lie down at night the last thing I see before I sleep is the universe. I want to travel out past the atmosphere and go deep into the dark where the galaxies are. I want to ask existence why, why any of this, why now, why me on this planet, why this life.

I have not found this house yet but every morning before my children wake up I go to Zillow to look. The app for me is not a place to browse but a place I inhabit. Every house I click, I enter. The houses are different but the life inside them is always the same. I find the living room and we are all in there, sitting next to the fire. I find the basement and I can hear my husband down there running on the treadmill. I find the library and I see my children at the table, bent over reading books. I find the kitchen and I am already preparing pilau and the chicken sauce that will go with it. The kitchen is clean and wide and it smells like home. My husband and kids are sitting at the marble counter, waiting for me to finish cooking and talking about how their day was. I am at the stove, stirring the pot and I call out: "taste this, tell me if the salt is right" and one of them does. I pour some juice for them to drink while they wait, and when the food is ready we don't move to the dining room. We just stay there at the counter eating together.

The sunroom opens to the pool. My husband is at the grill, turning meat he has already seasoned the way only he knows how to. The air smells of roasted meat. He checks the meat and says it's not ready but it will only take a few minutes. I nod. I am on the chair watching the kids in the water. They are racing, trying to see who gets to the other end first while laughing so loud the sound comes in over the music playing in the Beats boombox. I had already been in the water earlier and I am just basking, tired in a good way. My husband comes back and sits and we start talking about how we met, and then somehow we end up talking about Guilford and the green and the days we sat there homeless with sodas and our baby and looked at houses like this one wishing one of them would open its doors to us.

Now we are inside.

The house sits far from the road. You turn in through a grand gate and it takes you a few minutes to drive to the main entrance. On either side, the grass is green and freshly cut. The land is three acres all round. We have neighbors but they are not close. The driveway is lined with trees and when the house finally appears it's white, but not modern. It's a house that has stood long enough to have seen other lives come and go, a house that could say: "I have lived, and this is what I have seen."

My Zillow surf is not a lonely activity I do by myself. My husband is my accomplice and when I find a house I like, I send it to him on WhatsApp. He never dismisses me despite the houses being a million plus. We dissect each house I send and decide whether it goes on our favorites pile or gets discarded entirely. All the houses we favorite are always in the same three places. Guilford, Greenwich or Westport.

I love Guilford because the town was home even though we didn't have one. Greenwich and Westport I know from the inside of a rental car doing Amazon Flex. My husband would drive while I sat at the front sorting packages by number so we could move fast and finish early. The baby would be in her car seat at the back fast asleep. We prayed for Greenwich and Westport routes every time so we could drive through the neighborhoods when we finished the deliveries. The houses there were breathtaking. The towns spoke of old money and were full of green lawns and driveways that disappeared into trees. We wouldn't say much during the drives. We just looked at all that quiet wealth with zero envy and escaped the tough circumstances that were waiting for us down the road when we exited those neighborhoods.

Those neighborhoods never left me.

When I find a house in these three areas, I go through the tax records like a serious buyer. If the annual taxes are too high I close the listing immediately. It doesn't matter how beautiful the house is, the numbers have to make sense. I calculate what the tax bill breaks down to monthly. I look at the price history and ask why it was being sold for that particular price. I go further and check the Zestimate and run the loan numbers even though I know my credit is not where it needs to be and no bank would approve me.

I have not found the house yet. The day I find it, I will tell you.