My mother told me to be careful playing with fire while lighting incense. I told her that I was 30 years old and she told me that she was almost 70. I’m not sure what that meant, but it seemed to settle the argument.
I am living with my parents again. After 6 years, I find myself holed up in the basement, peering at the world through a smudged window pane. The house is full of ghosts, fragments of my shattered past that fly along my skin, picking and prodding at me as I shiver them. The first few days were the worst as I was hit full-force with memory and began to relive specific moments of my childhood, moments that would be replayed out in perfect sensory detail in my waking and sleeping states.
They are little ghosts, to be sure, but ghosts that carry all the weight of everything I have healed or left behind.
My parents’ house is the last stop on the “You Can Always Change Your Mind” train, a train that my mother loves to ride with me. I could very well just stay here and become 12 again, eating Hostess Cupcakes to mask the pain and locking myself in a musty basement. In a week and a half I leave town, bound for Seattle, eventually. Why? Because I have to. Because it is the thing I will do. Because that is where my story leads.
Liberating! They say that, you know. Usually, they say it right before they realize that you need money to survive, at which point they just smile nervously and say things like, “You’ll be fine”. I have gone through the horrible turmoil of resigning from my job, have sold or given away all my furniture and have reduced my belongings to 12 boxes of things, a computer, a laptop, some posters, a closet and a dresser full of clothes, and a car. I am surrounded by cartons of the past, labeled with black stencils and smelling of mold. I walk through them like the government worker who pushes that famous carton containing the Ark of the Covenant down the long hallway of cartons in the last scene of “Raiders of the Lost Ark”.
The upstairs seems to be 200 degrees in the daytime and the basement seems to remains at -200 year round. It rains frequently on the second floor. Geese often get confused in their migration and roost in the attic. So, I have decided to set up shop in the upstairs in time for the cooler days to roll in.
I now watch the night pass and listen to the crickets while I write my little stories.
Next week is full of closings and openings as I walk the circle and say farewell to all of my chosen family. Then the packing of the car. And then, on September 16th, it’s all over… and it all begins.