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.