Closing

I am sitting on the floor of my living room.  It’s my last day in the house.  While I have a few last minute things to knock out, and I’m sure it will take longer than I’d like, it will all get done (thanks, mostly, to my amazing friends who’ve stepped in to help me).  I will write the new owners a letter.  Then I’ll sign closing papers at 3:00.

I am sitting on the floor of my empty house.  It’s empty, except for some cleaning supplies and my luggage.  A few lightbulbs on the window sills.  A stray cat toy in the corner.  It’s empty, and I’m ready.  I’m a little sad, as I’m here at the end.  But all the purging and selling and packing of the last several months has brought me to this place where I really am okay.  This house has held me for the last three years.  It’s been a safe space for me, private, and sturdy.  It really has felt like home.  Oddly, it felt more like home the past six months than it did the year before he left.  

This house has also held some extreme sadness.  Otis died here and is buried next to the stump behind the shed.  After he died I’d go sit by him and feel comforted.  I miscarried in this house.  It was such a painful experience, and also the memory I have of the most tender moment with X, as he calmly removed the pad when the fetus had passed because I couldn’t do it.  We planted a lilac shrub at the edge of the yard in honor of our lost child.  It’s the place where he left me, running, without looking back and into the arms of another woman.  It’s the place where Moose brought me so much peace and joy in the midst of such pain, and where he died.  

That’s a pretty long list of sadness in just three years.  But it’s strange.  This house doesn’t make me sad.  I don’t feel like it holds the sadness or the memories.  If anything, I feel like it provided for me and held me up in a strange way.  I’m grateful to have lived here and to have loved here.  I’m even oddly grateful to have lost here.  It was a good place for that too.  

I am ready to say goodbye to this little plot of land.  I had big dreams for it, but I’ve let them go.  I guess I lost those dreams here too.  But I have new dreams, or at least, dreams of a feeling.  Maybe I can say the feeling of my dreams hasn’t changed, even if the circumstances have.  So I’m taking another step in moving on to make that dream of a feeling, a peace, contentment, and purpose a reality.  Here I go.