Unbroken Walls

One day you come home from school and see a realtor in your dining room, showing your parents where to sign the official looking papers sitting on the table. Suddenly, your house is up for sale and you have showings a few times a week and then some papers are signed and a new place to live is found and then the place that you call home, where you laugh and cry and spend hours at night doing homework and drinking tea and playing with your dog isn’t yours any longer, and the walls your posters are taped to aren’t yours and the doors aren’t yours and the cupboards aren’t yours, and soon the stove will be used by different people, taking food out of your fridge and cooking it on your stove which is no longer even yours but someone else’s, strangers you’ll never meet.

Somehow this happened to my family, for the second time in as many years. Just as I’ve learned to love my home and neighborhood and even my daily hour long commute to and from school, I have to stuff my life into boxes and move on. The last time we moved, it was from my childhood home, and as I’d never moved before, a lot more nostalgia and loss was felt then. This time around, it’s more the memories I could have made that I’m missing. In a week I’ll have lost the chance to make the familiar walk down to the nature reserve, sit on the roof outside my window and stare out at the lights of the city, or even run down the stairs and slide on my sock feet all the way to the fridge.

This time around, the hassle of moving itself combined with a love of our current house means I dread moving, but I know in the end everything will work out. I just dislike the in-between time, the time when I don’t feel like I belong in this house, and yet don’t belong in the new one either. This house taunts me, pointing me continually towards the clock which refuses to stop counting down the few days I have left to live in my home. At the same time, the new one is big and empty, full of new opportunities, though the opportunities manage to look simultaneously inviting and distressing. The other day we went to the new house, and my brother and I ran around, getting excited over plans for our new rooms, figuring out how all of our stuff would fit. On the other hand, finding excitement and goodness in moving is hard to do, and I’m having to make an effort to filter out the negatives.

With my stuffed animals in a box and our pictures taken down, my house no longer looks like home. The unbroken walls are no longer mine, although they still watch me fall on my bed with exhaustion every night and find breakfast every morning. They remain the witness’ to my last late night homework marathons, meals with my family, and hours spent working on a guitar song. These lasts are coming all too quickly, but I will treasure them. In a few days I will have left my room and my home for the last time, and looking back is never quite the same as looking forward.