what i thought would destroy me
leaves me stronger in its wake.
i am in absolute tears about moving. i know i shouldn't be, i know i shouldn't care about a house, but i do because this is my home and i grew up here in so many ways and i just want to hold every memory in my heart forever. and i'm sitting here with a double gulp full of white wine, in my old spot on the tile in the computer room and i just, i will miss my house too much. i miss my life too much.
there are too many things important that happened in this house, and the important things that didn't happen here were processed and dwelt on here. I wish I could have a film of everything in this house, but that would be everything. My whole life has been kept in check by these four walls, every stage of who I am and have ever been. I have passed all my cognizant years in this house and I can’t bear to leave it. I learned long division and looked up a thousand definitions and spent ten years worth of poorly time-managed late nights working on projects I should have gotten done months earlier. I’ve been too fat and too skinny in this house, plundered these cabinets for food and routinely purged them of it. I have read every harry potter book ever released. I have day dreamt about every boy that has ever crossed my heart, from alex kelso to kyle heer. I baked my first cookies and did my first loads of laundry. I rearranged my room through a thousand weekends and summer nights, with books on tape and my desk lamp on and loving the safe change. I painted my walls exactly three times, each a new evolution of my person. I learned my first tumbling passes on the porch, running round offs over and over again in the hallway. I have come home from multiple sleepovers, parties, movie trips, field trips, and school orientations. I have hosted many of those sleepovers, endless nights of laughing and talking that spilled over into beach days and more movie nights and boat days. I have nursed every injury, literal and figurative, that has ever befallen me. These walls are my childhood and my adolescence, and as such, are the context of my adulthood.
I remember this house in every phase of its life, just as I remember every phase of my own as it coincided. This house and I have become simultaneously more polished as the years have passed, but together we share an unappealing and distasteful past. Slowly, and achingly, we have grown to be what we are today. But like a secret between old friends, I and this house know each other. And like old friends, we have loved each other when there was no one else to love us. When in my sophomore year the two of us sat lonely and abandoned, we at least sat those things together. When, as now, it has sat empty and skeletal, I have been here to love its exposed trusses and unfinished floors. Whole parts of who I am are tied up in this building and I like to think that in its little house heart, it thinks of me that way, too.
we're all turning twenty one, and that scares me. it scares me that we're in our twenties, because i can remember so clearly (though distantly at the same time) us turning 7. i am grateful beyond belief and so regularly that we are still friends, and maybe, probably, that is what i should focus on. i do, really, i focus on that so much. because in real life, you guys are my family. like, that's it, it's not a metaphor, you are the people i know will be there at the end of the day and i value that SO much. and i miss ashley, because she is the first best friend i ever had in my entire life and it makes me really sad that that doesn't mean anything, anything, to her. it's not something i am actively upset about on a regular basis, but this house has her face lurking around every corner and because of that, it's hard to let it go right now.
but overall and on the real, i am too blessed by the friends i have, both in how great they are and how long i have known them. sometimes i feel alone and scared and desperate and then i remember the people that love me and i am ok. i am ok.
i know this is supposed to be about my house, but in way the two concepts are tied together. both are constants in my life, and also, this house is where the official s-hood started. i remember that night so well, the five of us lined up in chairs on the top deck and sketching out the details of who we were, all in the context of one another. and it was overly dramatic and stagey and ceremonial but i live for that, and my little eleven year old heart was swept away and defined in that sticky florida moonlit night. it just, it was, irrevocably and mercifully.
and that was here, just like a zillion sleepovers that year, and those years, were. a zillion beach trips and songs made up and giggles shared. those years were awful and tortured for me but those moments saved me, just as they save me today. bless those girls and bless this house.
it occurred to me the other day that other people have their regular life, with friends and whatever, and then a Thing that is just theirs, like something they tell their friends about but really, is their own personal Thing. and for most people that is a hobby or an activity or a career, but for me, it's you guys. you are the context in which i explain myself, the basis for every anecdote i relate to my IRL, regular hangout friends. i explain myself in my life through the memories and interactions and dynamics that we have, and that is so comforting to me. that there is something in this world to define myself by other than myself. i belong to something, so some people, and that is invaluable.
in conclusion, i love you all. i love my grandma and matt and mike lyons and all my cousins and my daddy and even, in our own way, my momma, but i love you all because you know me for and through everything, and you love me anyway. i am sure sure sure that these outpourings of love are both annoying and too numerous, but i don't care. i don't care that i care the most. i have a life, a real life, separate from this and from you, i really do. but i live that life in the context of this stability and i appreciate that so much that literally my heart might burst apart at any second because it is too good.
i also am a few glasses of wine in, so there is a degree of vinous sentimentality. but sober me loves you as much as tipsy me does, i promise.
god bless the moon, and god bless me. and god bless the somebodies i want to see.
and god bless this home.