... And home is nowhere

My mom is selling my childhood home. I don't blame her -- it's getting difficult for her, at 60, to manage and maintain a sprawling house, and she's never liked living a fifteen to twenty minute drive outside of town.

But fuck! She's selling the house! No! NO! NONONONONONOOOOO!

I learned to play guitar in that house. I had my own bedroom for the first time. We moved into that house in 1987; I was ten. I GREW UP in that house. Got my first period. Shaved my legs for the first time after Nick Q. made fun of my hairy legs during seventh-grade swimming class. I had birthday parties there. Innumerable family holidays, made all the more wacky by the fact that my mom couldn't cook to save her life.

Homecomings and learning to drive and walking down to the creek to smoke Viceroy cigarettes with my neighbor Tom. Once, a boy skiied miles to that house so he could see me during the blizzard of 1994. Breaking up with that same boy in the driveway and finding my class ring on the seat of my car the next morning. First kisses in the garage in February 1995 that made my knees buckle. Sitting on the stairs and smoking until he had to leave. Sneaking out, sneaking back in.

A secret keg party one summer when my parents were out of town for the weekend. Hair-dye parties in the kitchen and trying to make Baklava for an Art History class project. Watching my first horror movie (Witchboard) at a fifth-grade slumber party.

Whispered late-night phone calls in my bedroom, in the kitchen. And then coming home from college and feeling ... simultaneously safe and relieved and trapped and anxious. I loved and hated that house, that family that we were, the geography, the anticipation that there was so much room, so much space that we had all grown apart. We could all be home and never see each other, never have to run into one another. We had a fucking intercom system, for Christ's sake, so you could push a button and ask where your family was. We were each all alone and something was going to happen.

And when it did, it exploded in that house. We weren't ever the same after that. Fifteen years later and I still sleep poorly there. I won't be upset to let that go. But the rest ... the beautiful innocent breathtaking certainty that the world would always be okay, that the house would fill with joy and laughter instead of aching longing for the rest of it will hurt like hell.

I'm not ready for that. But I have to be. Because I have to help my mother clean out that house on Saturday.