Today is the most ambiguous moving day yet.
Moving is not usually something I have an emotional reaction to; I've moved so many times that, years ago, when a professor of mine asked us to write about "home," I couldn't figure out what she meant and projected the notion onto my family, rather than any one place.
My childhood was a swirl of new houses, new schools, and moving days. Place of residence became my chronometer; I could tell time only by location, which is why my sisters and I sound like we speak in code, peppering our speech with "yellow house three" and "UBC 1" any time we sift through our recollections of youth. I don't remember living anywhere for even two complete years. I remember times when I didn't even bother to unpack.
Now, without ever realizing it was happening, I've gone and blown all of that. My portable sense of home became temporally, spatially stuck while I wasn't even watching. Today, for the first time in my life, I feel like I'm leaving home - something that wasn't even a consideration back when home wasn't a place.
Six and a half years. To a nomad, that's longer than a lifetime, at least in how it feels. It has slipped though my fingers like tad pools in the ponds of our childhoods, something that we never really tried to grasp. In that time, I completed one degree and another and begun a career. Five years ago, my other half moved in with me and we built a life together. It was, I think, the first time I've fully invested myself in a communal project. The first time I've trusted someone else enough to depend on them since back in the days when dependence wasn't a choice.
Today, we are moving. I tell myself that this is no big deal, that I've done this dozens of times, that the boxes will flow through my fingers as easily as those tad poles once did. But, if I were to try to speak those words aloud, the lump in my throat would get in the way. This place, for all its imperfections, is the only home I've ever built myself. It has been my fortress, my solace, my starting point and destination. Here, I have had some sense of the security that I never wanted to admit that I needed.
I feel like a gambler who's lingered too long at the craps table without stopping to ask, why am I taking this chance?