Or no. You can do it alone, but it'll be much more difficult.
Eh. Maybe you could do it alone easily if you have a lot of money to get a robot to carry it for you, but then there'd be no one except the robot to talk to you at the end of the move and they don't have much personality yet.
What I'm saying is, you've got to have a family.
Family doesn't mean blood kin, though it can, and that's a wonderful thing. Family means the people who can drop everything to come help you, who'll hold you when you cry, who'll support you in love and kindness and force unwanted but necessary hugs on you.
That's all well-trod, known information but it bears restating. Family is people who love you. And you need that.
Now, I always knew, on some level, that Crossflame was family. It's the youth choir that I planned my weekday and summer schedules around for ten years, people I looked forward to seeing, a wonderful, comfortable place. Crossflame was the reason I first went to Scotland, so for that reason alone I'm grateful. It was one of many families I’ve had over the years- marching band, camp staff, SAI, planetarium staff, various church friends. For my whole life, I’ve never felt alone or like an outsider, even though I keep myself to myself. I’ve got a great blood family and many more besides.
But then Friday night, day 4 of this year’s Crossflame tour, rolls around and we’re sitting around this fire pit with no campfire, sharing and passing around my phone with the flashlight on, and I know I’m not a part of this family, such as it is. The kids I do know I haven’t seen since they were in kid’s choir and the rest of them have only ever seen my heightened self, the loud leader who knows the plan and how best to make it happen. That person is efficient, functional, capable, and I cling to her positive qualities because they’re all that get me through days like these. These kids don't know me. My family isn’t here with these children sharing halting stories about the profundity they think they’ve seen; it’s hundreds of miles away with my real friends and my internet and my bed and my home. I’ve made a place for myself over the past couple of years and I want to run to it. I’ve never in my life been homesick like this before.
It’s not like God’s helping either. That’s what we’re sharing- God moments- and the deity has been distressingly silent towards me for a while. All I want is a confirmation that I’m doing the right thing, the peace that I used to have, the anointment that David got. If that cheating, murdering SOB can get the full blessing of the Holy Spirit, surely I deserve at least a trickle of affirmation. And so, long after the kids have departed from the cold fire, feeling like they’ve bonded (and in some ways, many of them genuinely have), I’m sitting and staring up at the trees, silently begging and accusingly the sky for reprieves and of crimes I’m not sure I even understand. I’m angry.
By now, my life-couch is sitting firmly on the ground, piled high with wants and needs and desires and frustrations and abandonment and stubbornness and anger draped like a blanket over all the rest. Anger that I’m wasting my time with a bunch of kids who clearly don’t need me on a trip that could be running without me when I could be warm and comfortable in front of my TV. Anger that this transition is so hard, that my life is packed in boxes and I don’t know where I’m going to live come September. Anger that everything I’ve been doing since the 10th grade could have been a mistake and nobody told me. Anger over past hurts. Anger over omission. Anger over perpetual loneliness. Anger, anger, anger.
I could have tried to carry my couch, but why bother? I’d just have to move it again anyway. So all of Saturday, I sat in front of my life-couch, knees pulled to my chest, perpetually ten seconds from tears.
(Worried that I'm going to leave you with a sad ending? Don't worry! Part 2 is here for you: http://blackbirdberry.blogspot.com/2015/07/moving-couch-part-2-crossflame-tour.html)
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