when are you gonna land?
My parents have touched down and begun the arduous process of unpacking in Mahomet, IL. I don’t know what it’s like: what it looks like, what it feels like, what it smells like.
You know how you can only smell your house when you come back after having left for a number of hours? I wonder if the smell of our old house was inherent to that house or to the things in the house that have moved to the new house.
True to form, I can’t explain what it smelled like. It smelled good, but I do wonder if that was because it smelled good, empirically, or because it smelled familiar. Familiar is good. It didn’t smell bad, anyway.
I’ve been sorting through my feelings about this for a long time, but particularly during this past week, mirroring the actual, physical efforts of the move. This week, I’ve been fighting with a sense of unease, a small quiet ache in my chest, a truckload of apathy toward my science, and a near-constant twinge of pain in my head that I’ve been combating by munching ibuprofen. At least I can medicate for headaches.
I think the weirdest slice of the whole weird pie, here, was Thursday, when my parents were in the cars that they were taking 12 hours west and I received a text about how they were leaving. The day before, Mom texted me about how gorgeous the house looked even without anything in it.
Both of those texts made me feel powerfully.. something. It wasn’t quite sadness, although I was certainly sad. The best I can do is try to explain the way I felt when I was leaving high school.
As I headed up to graduation - I can probably remember this so well because I’ve recently been marinating in old journals as my interest was spiked by the yearbooks I hauled back to New Haven from Liverpool - I felt uneasy, a little bit frightened (different fear than the ESF to Yale transition, which was sharper, stronger, and completely paralyzing). I walked around the school in those last few days, learning physics to take the physics regents because I wanted to belong just a little bit longer.
I walked around with the knowledge that this school wasn’t going to be mine, and with the knowledge that in a couple of months or years or whatever arbitrary time unit you like best I wasn’t going to miss the building.
And it tugged somewhere in my chest, because this was where I’d belonged.
So the last time I was home. in my last few hours at 8402 Sugar Pine Circle, I walked around the house, looking at things and wondering how I could burn them more permanently into my memory. I just sort of desperately paced, not sure what was worth trying to prioritize for space in my scattered memories, staring at the elementary school artwork in the basement and the pictures on the walls in the dining room.
The sort of funny-sad thing is that I have this fear that I’m going to forget. And I know I’m going to forget, eventually. I have this kind of weird bubble that I’m carrying delicately around in my memory, trying not to pop it but not able to look closely at it. I can still see the rooms in that house in my memory, the way they were before all of our things were packed up, but I’m scared to examine them for fear of realizing that I’ve already lost more than I think.
I’m not even sure why it scares me to think about not being able to remember that house. Or why I don’t like to think about how my family isn’t located in Liverpool anymore. It puts my definition of ‘home’ in flux, so I’ve tentatively attached that to my apartment here in New Haven, but that feels lonely. A home of one.
Lots of those bubbles in my head, actually. More than I realized. It staves off the panic - or at least mutes it - to hold them delicately at arm’s length and know they’re there. I realize this is a weird analogy, but it seems like it works to me.
Distance is frightening.
I wonder if the neighbors on Sugar Pine could hear us when we practiced with the windows open. I feel certain that someone must have heard Cappricio Espagnol as I got it into my fingers and embouchure, because that piccolo could absolutely scream (in the best way - hopefully?). But there were All-State audition pieces, long tones, scales and arpeggios, etudes. There were duets on the piano, loud, crashing Rachmaninoff and Chopin, subtle Debussy, rollicking Gershwin, meticulous Bach, point and counterpoint in Mozart… the scales I somehow never managed to practice and therefore master, much to Mrs. Auser’s dismay. I wonder if the neighbors liked it.
Ultimately, I think it hurts - indistinctly, but there it is - to let go. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about moving on, and it’s the letting go of somewhere that I not only loved but also belonged in a fundamental sense. Reattachment takes some time, but I do always get there.
I don’t know how to end this entry but I don’t have anything else to say right now, so I guess that’s that… ?
My parents have touched down and begun the arduous process of unpacking in Mahomet, IL. I don’t know what it’s like: what it looks like, what it feels like, what it smells like.
You know how you can only smell your house when you come back after having left for a number of hours? I wonder if the smell of our old house was inherent to that house or to the things in the house that have moved to the new house.
True to form, I can’t explain what it smelled like. It smelled good, but I do wonder if that was because it smelled good, empirically, or because it smelled familiar. Familiar is good. It didn’t smell bad, anyway.
I’ve been sorting through my feelings about this for a long time, but particularly during this past week, mirroring the actual, physical efforts of the move. This week, I’ve been fighting with a sense of unease, a small quiet ache in my chest, a truckload of apathy toward my science, and a near-constant twinge of pain in my head that I’ve been combating by munching ibuprofen. At least I can medicate for headaches.
I think the weirdest slice of the whole weird pie, here, was Thursday, when my parents were in the cars that they were taking 12 hours west and I received a text about how they were leaving. The day before, Mom texted me about how gorgeous the house looked even without anything in it.
Both of those texts made me feel powerfully.. something. It wasn’t quite sadness, although I was certainly sad. The best I can do is try to explain the way I felt when I was leaving high school.
As I headed up to graduation - I can probably remember this so well because I’ve recently been marinating in old journals as my interest was spiked by the yearbooks I hauled back to New Haven from Liverpool - I felt uneasy, a little bit frightened (different fear than the ESF to Yale transition, which was sharper, stronger, and completely paralyzing). I walked around the school in those last few days, learning physics to take the physics regents because I wanted to belong just a little bit longer.
I walked around with the knowledge that this school wasn’t going to be mine, and with the knowledge that in a couple of months or years or whatever arbitrary time unit you like best I wasn’t going to miss the building.
And it tugged somewhere in my chest, because this was where I’d belonged.
So the last time I was home. in my last few hours at 8402 Sugar Pine Circle, I walked around the house, looking at things and wondering how I could burn them more permanently into my memory. I just sort of desperately paced, not sure what was worth trying to prioritize for space in my scattered memories, staring at the elementary school artwork in the basement and the pictures on the walls in the dining room.
The sort of funny-sad thing is that I have this fear that I’m going to forget. And I know I’m going to forget, eventually. I have this kind of weird bubble that I’m carrying delicately around in my memory, trying not to pop it but not able to look closely at it. I can still see the rooms in that house in my memory, the way they were before all of our things were packed up, but I’m scared to examine them for fear of realizing that I’ve already lost more than I think.
I’m not even sure why it scares me to think about not being able to remember that house. Or why I don’t like to think about how my family isn’t located in Liverpool anymore. It puts my definition of ‘home’ in flux, so I’ve tentatively attached that to my apartment here in New Haven, but that feels lonely. A home of one.
Lots of those bubbles in my head, actually. More than I realized. It staves off the panic - or at least mutes it - to hold them delicately at arm’s length and know they’re there. I realize this is a weird analogy, but it seems like it works to me.
Distance is frightening.
I wonder if the neighbors on Sugar Pine could hear us when we practiced with the windows open. I feel certain that someone must have heard Cappricio Espagnol as I got it into my fingers and embouchure, because that piccolo could absolutely scream (in the best way - hopefully?). But there were All-State audition pieces, long tones, scales and arpeggios, etudes. There were duets on the piano, loud, crashing Rachmaninoff and Chopin, subtle Debussy, rollicking Gershwin, meticulous Bach, point and counterpoint in Mozart… the scales I somehow never managed to practice and therefore master, much to Mrs. Auser’s dismay. I wonder if the neighbors liked it.
Ultimately, I think it hurts - indistinctly, but there it is - to let go. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about moving on, and it’s the letting go of somewhere that I not only loved but also belonged in a fundamental sense. Reattachment takes some time, but I do always get there.
I don’t know how to end this entry but I don’t have anything else to say right now, so I guess that’s that… ?
