My parents are moving out of the house they have called home for over forty years. They feel forced out by a changing and unsafe neighborhood. I want them to go but at the same time I am sorry to say good-bye to the house where so many of my life’s important events happened. We moved there the summer before I started junior high or seventh grade. I was a tall skinny girl with stingy blond hair and acne. When we moved back to the US from Guam I had struggled to find friends and fit in at my old school across town. A year later my dad came home from his tour in Vietnam we moved to this house where they’ve stayed after about fourteen years of moving once a year. The house has always been too small for a family of five, but it was built in the early sixties when you got a real backyard with your house. I’ve spent many hours in deep thought sitting in the porch swing on that patio. The old growth plants and single-story neighbors kept the yard private and oasis like. From high school drama all the way through my fight with breast cancer that backyard has given me solace that I haven’t found anywhere else. The new yard is tiny and has huge two-story houses looking down into it.
I spent my last night in my old room on the 23rd and the next day helped them get ready for movers. I wasn’t there when the movers came, but that day I had dinner with my friend Heather who was packing up and heading home after finishing grad school. Heather invited me to her apartment in the Berkeley Hills to drink wine, eat some food and watch the sun set. Her apartment was high enough that we looked down on the fog bank that coated San Francisco Bay leaving only the tips of high rises poking through. We could see the sun set to pale oranges and purples. And then I said good-bye to Heather the person that has been my closest friend from school.
The next morning, Thursday, I woke up in a paralyzing depression. Almost unable to get out of bed I was wondering if I was okay. And as I lay there I realized that it wasn’t one event like a death or tragedy, but the culmination of so many endings and so many employment rejections that had weighed me down into feeling very tiny and small and almost unwilling to continue the fight. The only bright light in the past eight months is graduating from graduate school. Losing my job on January 12th put me into this spiral that doesn’t appear to have an ending. I lost a good friend from work about six weeks later. He had lived a good full life until his heart gave out. He always had my back and gave me emotional support during very tough times, calling to see how I was feeling when I was sick. When I finished the first draft of my thesis I missed him the most because I had been counting on him to read it and fix my punctuation. I know he’s sorry he didn’t get a chance to read it. He would have been so proud of me for finishing school.
So with no job to go to, no school, no close friend nearby, no familiar family home, I feel as though I’ve had too many endings this summer and really need a beginning or a new opportunity show up soon. I deserve something good to happen, it’s about time.
