Moving the Couch Part 3: Moving

If you read my initial angsty post about the difficulties of making friends with teenagers on a choir trip, you heard me say that my home was hundreds of miles away. Turns out that home is an ill-defined term and any level of ambiguity is helpful when you’re doing your best to not offend anyone in anyplace that you deem home-worthy. Because otherwise, you know, tears.

Now, I fake moved out from my place in Chapel Hill about a month ago, before Crossflame tour, because the original plan was for me to move out then and because I like even vestigial plans. All I had left to pack was the odds and ends before my little brother came to get my bed, but I took about a week so that I could revel in the joy that is my own space. I mean, I have my own space at my parents’ house, but, as anyone who’s moved back in to their ancestral home can tell you, there’s a whole different set of expectations for your “own space” at your parents’ house. Plus, I adored my little room at Tottenham. I had a chalkboard wall and fairy lights and nerd posters galore. 

I also had some goodbyes to say. I’d already had my work goodbye and my church goodbye and there’s no reason to redo those, but I had some friends in town that I wouldn’t mind another week with. We watched TV and talked and went to movies and cooked and drank and that’s about all I need from life, I think. We went to go see that Disney movie about feelings and I have to say, you do not feel the extent of that movie until you’ve watched it with your friends on your last night in town. 

And then I came home. Well, I mean, then I packed everything I had left and it was just an absurd amount of stuff that barely fit in my little car and then my brother came by and we put my mattress and box spring and other sundries in the back of his truck and he put a tarp on it that I had acquired and thirty minutes down the road I realized that we had forgotten the bed rails for my bed and had a minor emotional breakdown and I am surprised at how often those occur when moving. Goodness knows where my life-couch is now. I may have left it somewhere along exit 266 on 40 west. I’ll start looking soon.

See, I never really moved. I mean, I moved into Tottenham three years ago, but we had the storage pods that they drop off and pick up and drop off and pick up and all you have to do is load your stuff into it and that’s so much easier than getting a mattress into the back of a pickup and driving it a couple hundred miles across the state. And I know I must have moved my mattress into my Rock Creek apartment the year before that, but I don’t remember that at all. Maybe we had a van? 

But I never did the pack-up-whole-rooms-of-the-house-and-pray-you-can-see-out-the-back-window kind of move. And I never crammed a whole comfortable life back into my room at my parents’ house, which already had its own established comfortable life. 

Moving is… hard, you know? Leaving people you care about and may never see again and will slowly lose touch with as you both go about your lives even though there’s the entire internet to help with that. Tearing down a place that has been your comfort in exchange for a place that hasn’t felt like yours in years, even though your furniture and pictures and awards and books are all around. Figuring out what to do with your time and how to explain to your parents that so much of what you want to do with your summer off involves a computer and a set of headphones. Not knowing whether to be sorry or persistent about that. It’s all those readjustments on top of digging through yet another box of clothes to find one decent tank top that makes you squirm in your new old bed, uncomfortable on the down and in deep desire of your own sheets and comforter and tiny, flat pillows. 

You lose a little bit of yourself when you leave. And I’d heard that, but I’d never felt it. That’s really the definition of my life experience. I’ve heard that leaving is difficult, but it hadn’t been for me. I’ve heard that you need other people to care about you, but never lived that need. I’ve heard that people cry when they think they’ll never see each other again and… well, that still hasn’t happened to me, but expect me to blog about it when it does.

As a segue, I’d love to introduce you to my new blog, Allowed. It’s still finding its legs, but I want it to be a little more focused than I’ve been. I’ve got a journal let’s be real it’s a diary where I can chat into the ether about my feelings and hopefully you’ll get the more processed version of that. There’s a lot of nevers that are going to get knocked off my list in the near future- I’ve never been to California, I’ve never seen the Grand Canyon, I’ve never gone to a gigantic nerd conference about Youtube, I’ve never moved to another country, I’ve never gone to school in a castle, I’ve never written a thesis. I want to take those things, those first time feelings, and situate them in light of what I think I can be and what I’ve found I’m allowed to be. 

So yeah. The writing continues. The thinking continues. Because if we’re talking about homes, the one I’ve always known is the one I've carried around in my head, and, no matter where I physically end up, I’m pretty certain I’ll always have one here on the internet. 

Thanks for that, everyone.