My mother warned me to be careful playing with fire while lighting incense. I told her that I was 30 years old and, angrily, 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. I find myself holed up in their basement, peering at the world through a smudged window pane. The house is full of little ghosts – little ghosts that carry all the weight of everything I have healed or left behind., fragments of my childhood that fly along my skin, picking and prodding at me as I shiver them.
I entertain their conversations, memories flashing in front of me rapidly, faded imprints on a Viewmaster screen, equal amounts of nostalgia and cringe. And when I tire of that, I watch the night pass and I listen to the crickets while I wonder aloud what the hell I am doing.
The upstairs seems to be 200 degrees in the daytime and the basement seems to remains at -200 degrees year round. It rains frequently on the second floor. Geese often get confused in their migration and roost in the attic. It’s convenient being able to travel from the Arctic to the tropics and to stop along the way for a quick snack of American Cheese slices and some deviled eggs. If only what I was planning was that easy.
In a week and a half I leave town, specifically Columbus Ohio, and drive across country to Seattle.
Why relocate almost the entire width of the country away from where you were born and have lived ever since? There’s really no easy answer to that. It’s not a job that propels me or a new relationship or a scholarship. In fact it’s just the opposite. I have been given a series of endings to work with – the slow death decline of a five-year dream job; the final dissolution of a on-again, off again relationship with the love of my life; and the end of the road for me in terms of what Columbus can provide on the creative, personal and spiritual front.
When I started to weigh my options for next steps, my intense burnout was obvious, my disinterest in continuing the same patterns I had been following was strong in my heart, and at the very edge of my being was this yearning – a yearning for the far north, for the ocean – a yearning that had been sparked a few years earlier by a trip to the woods and the coast of Maine.
But instead of east, I turned my attention west – west to a city that might hold hope for a new start , a city nestled in the rainy, foggy Pacific Northwest where I hoped to find myself again.
Flash forward to today. I have gone through the turmoil of resigning from my job, have sold or given away all my furniture and have reduced my belongings to 12 boxes of assorted items, 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 mildew. I walk through them like the government worker who pushes that famous crate containing the Ark of the Covenant down the long hallway of similar crates in the last scene of “Raiders of the Lost Ark”.
My parents’ house has become the last station on the “You Can Always Change Your Mind” train, a train that my mother named and loves to ride with me, every… single… day. And sure, I could very well just stay here and become 12 again, eating Hostess Cupcakes to mask the pain, digging out my old Atari 2600 and locking myself in a musty basement bedroom until my skin loses what color it has. But I’m not going to do that. I have to see this through.
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.