Blackout

DAY THREE HUNDRED AND FORTY-FOUR: The Pauper's Back Porch

What are earmarks of our lives?  Birthdays, New Years, and anniversaries.  These are randomly selected dates based on a calendar that dictate the passing of time.  But as days blur into weeks, weeks into months, and months into years; time becomes less visible in our memories.  It's harder to remember what year events occurred in my adult life without the demarkation of school years.  I became an adult at 18 - in 2005.  But I became an independent adult while living in this apartment.  This apartment I say goodbye to tomorrow.

As you get older, life becomes less about monumental dates and more about moments.  Like the moment you cut yourself off from your parents financially.  Or the moment you decided to fuck a life not worth living and start one that was.  Or the moments you spent on your back porch figuring out who you are.

Tonight, my last night in my apartment, I decided to have one final GrubHub food delivery to 3050 N Greenview.  Some fabulous (read: decent) Thai food.  I popped open my Netflix and put on a documentary.  Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me (a carryover from my recent 30 Rock re-binge).  After an hour and twenty minutes spent watching a woman contemplate her impending mortality (made all the more poignant after her recent death) by shuffling on with what she loves to do in sassy, brassy fashion; it made my forced reflection on this apartment much more imperative.

So onto the dirty work.  There was still some packing to be done.  I've spent the past couple of weeks slowly taking things from my shelves and cupboards and shoving them into boxes that I'll have to reopen like Christmas presents after you already peeked in the basement.  My kitchen has looked just a little barer.  My bathroom a wee bit more sparse.  Even the lack of furniture in our shared living room didn't seem to bother me.

But as I consolidated the bulk of my furniture into our dining room to make the moving process easier, I turned and looked at the nakedness of my bedroom and burst into tears.  A room that has shelved my memories, my personality, and my life for the past three and a half years was now just another blank slate for a new life to infiltrate.  It's not mine anymore.  The most stability I've had in my life in years is now gone.

I had to get out.  I grabbed my beer, my ipod, and my tears, and I headed outside.  To my back porch.

There it was.  Unchanged by packing.  Never big enough to furnish, I've always chosen to sit on the bare wood while sipping on my wine and staring off at the large tree whose outline looks like a cross between an Edgar Allen Poe and a Shel Silverstein poem.  I searched my ipod for the perfect song to calm me down, as I've done a thousand times before.  And there I sat.  Looking inside myself, trying to get a hold of my emotion.  Not to get rid of it.  Never to get rid of it.  Because it's on that porch, where all the tears and fears and anger were welcomed.  Where I learned to stop pushing my emotions out.  Where I finally understood that each and everything I feel can and will be used for good.  To spread to others like a promiscuous 15 year old with mono.  (Or maybe she's just someone who really likes to share her water bottle.  Who am I to judge?)

I spent years of my life trying to rid myself of my inner demons.  Therapy gone bad years ago made me believe that they were ridiculous.  My moodiness pushed people away.  It became a burden.  And I had to quash them.

But as I grew lonelier and lonelier, less reliant on friendships who found solace in significant others and lovers who found little solace in me, those demons became all I had.  So if they were there to stay, I might as well learn to live with them.  And once I grabbed ahold of them, I became more able to twist them and use them for my own gain.  To release them on the world.

My lonely nights on my back porch.  They made me who I am.  Time we spend with others can be magical.  But the time we spend with ourselves is essential.

So as I sat there, stumbling upon an old Muse song, I couldn't help but smile.  My tears evaporated on my cheeks as the cool Chicago wind blew them so only the salt remained.  "Don't grow up too fast / And don't embrace the past."  And on my back porch, I bid my apartment a humble good bye.  Not embracing the past, but simply utilizing it in the way it's - by nature - intended.  To be remembered.

This Must Be the Place

DAY THREE HUNDRED AND THIRTY-NINE: The Pauper Says Goodbye

And now, I say to you all, "Good bye."

I'm kidding.  I'm not going anywhere.  I'm just going to keep on waxing poetic regardless of whether you read or not.

Two parallel milestones are currently occurring in my life.  Friday, my parents closed on our house.  The house I grew up in.  The house I spent my adolescence.  The only place I've called home.

Until I found my home.

This Saturday, I will be leaving the apartment I have called home for three and a half years.  The home I moved into at the malleable age of 23.  The home I found my adult family in.

Selling my childhood home has been a series of crying wolf.  After moving to Maryland in 1999, my family finally decided to dig its roots.  I had lived in five houses and two apartments for the first 11 years of my life.  So it was a relief to stay grounded during grades 6 through 12.  And as I left for college, my home was constantly on the precipice of leaving me.  My dad's job was ever-changing.  And many times I remember receiving the devastating phone call that they would be moving.

Though it never came to fruition, the nostalgic in me feared losing touch with the only constant I had known for years.  Regardless of finding new life in Chicago.  It was always comforting to know I could go home.

I moved into my first non-Chicago dorm residence in 2008.  Between 2008 and 2011, I moved into three apartments and one house.  I was a nomad who never grew attached to the place she called "home", because I knew I still had one back in Frederick, Maryland.

Until I moved with my best friend into my Greenview apartment.  It was the only place I scoped out myself.  And we signed a criminally cheap lease in Lakeview thanks to signing a 16 month guarantee.

As my family moved to a new country, and my brother and I grew more and more distant, evolution forced me to find a new home and family.  My roommate became my brother, my touchstone.  Someone I wasn't afraid to hop into bed with and watch videos of Beyonce ad nauseam.

Earlier this year, we decided to end our living arrangement for him to move in with his boyfriend.  I felt ready to begin a new, but apprehensive of leaving behind this life I had cultivated over three plus years.

It was only fitting that around that same time, my parents announced they were finally putting our Maryland house up for sale.  And a funny thing happened on the way to a real estate agent... I didn't care.

I wasn't taking moody walks to the beach pondering what life would be like without my Maryland home.  I wasn't going through old pictures of the good times shared with friends and family in that home.  I wasn't buying jugs of frosting in bulk to reminisce over the multiple tubs I sucked down of them after school when no one was home.

I just said, "Okay."

But now, as I read the news that the closing went through, I sit here staring at the boxes in my apartment that I have packed.  I'm staring at the empty bookshelf where Cody kept his DVDs.  I'm rummaging through my cabinets jonesing for a jar of peanut butter to lick off a spoon.  But there is none to be found, because ain't nobody got the room to buy new groceries before moving out.

A house is an object.  It's a place you stay so you aren't on the street.  You pay rent.  You spend ridiculous amounts of money on heat when it's forty below.  You hang your Moulin Rouge poster on the fifth wall of a residence.  But a home?  A home is where you cry.  Where you laugh.  Where you grow.  And shape.  It's where you look back on the hole in the wall where you jammed a knife out of frustration.  Where you can joke about your slanted shanty floors.  Where you still find the imperfection in the bathroom door that looks like a moorish face.  A home is where memories are cultivated.  Fresh and raw.  

And sooner or later, every home you have reverts back to a house.  Because you find a home to replace it.  You find new memories that feel so important they take precedence in your mind.

So as I look around at the blank walls in my home, the boxes that I grabbed years ago at a Dominick's to shovel my things around; I know that there is only one home I have to say goodbye to this month.  There is one place that I will be thinking of for the next few months with nostalgic longing.  And that home is no longer on the east coast.