Home.

The long goodbye to my first love continues. Goodbye to the walls which embraced me in my darkest times. The floors which captured my tears and laughter. The scenery that soothed me as I fell apart and puzzle pieces myself back together to survive another day.

Downstairs, the spaces which, since altered, once held me as I listened to my “The Little Mermaid” tape to capture the lyrics of “Part of Your World” pausing and rewinding every second (for the record it’s not pregnant women, sick of swimming, ready to stand), the same floor where I made a brilliant stop motion video about The Bluest Eye, the spot where I came home from school one day, having forgotten my key, and climbed through an unlocked window and fell face first into the game room, successfully entering, nonetheless. And I walk barefoot on the floors where countless games of War were played and Erector sets were erected in the best moments with my father, in happier times.

And the music, the constant music — the mix of 1950s rock & roll and classical, occasionally musical theatre, always blasting from my father’s room through the rest of the house, so loud it has imprinted in the walls, etched into them like a secret record. And the vicious words screamed and doors slammed and the loud beating of my heart in fear that I may not have a mother come morning. That was music here too. Even in supposed silence here I still hear it all playing softly.

Upstairs, to muted orchestration, the carpeting still bleeds through with acrylic paint and glitter. The corners of my bedroom where, when I fit, I hid from the world under my bed, or checked cautiously lifting the eyelet bed skirt for the evil person who would stab be through my mattress with a giant sword after I fell asleep. The door I stared at worried the house was on fire and afraid to touch it and discover it was hot. The windows I looked out imagining my room detaching from the house and floating upwards into the sky. The space where I couldn’t fall asleep as I thought of what it would like to be dead and closed my eyes so tight and tried to feel nothing.

Downstairs, the kitchen where meals were enjoyed and arguments frequented and Jeopardy was on tv every weeknight at 7. The backyard, a park by California standards, and the hundreds of tall trees that sway violently in summer storms and rest heavy under winter’s snow.

Much has changed here, but much still the same, for now.

And even with all the changes — being here I only have to close my eyes and I’m a little girl all over again.

Here, I sit. I sit and study the living room furniture, despite the loss of surrounding wallpaper, as it tells the stories of years of family Chanukah parties, of that one time when my dad read me The Hardy Boys, though I couldn’t get into it, and points nearby to the kitchen and dining room where countless battles over why I could not in the life of me remember math processes after I solved one equation perfectly were held nightly until my dad just gave up on any chance he passed his intellect on to me. And I gave up on myself.

All of it here is all of me. Good, bad, horrible, all of it. I know it’s just a house. I know people move from house to house all the time and I’m turning 36 next week and I need to let these walls go.

But the thought of it unravels me. I can’t bare the thought of anyone else living here. It’s so much more than a house. So much more than a home. I have such horrible memory but here I remember everything. The good and the bad of it. The secret kisses upstairs and the lack of kisses downstairs. Selling this house may not be the death of me but certainly a part of me will perish as a new family moves in and a new kid misses the bus daily (or not) and has her father drive her to school. A new kid will maybe enjoy humid summer nights and chasing lightening bugs and running through sprinklers and building snowmen and kicking piles of wet leaves and waking up to snowflakes and the best words a kid can hear “it’s going to be a snow day.”

I should be happy that someone new will have this all and make it their own. House or not, the memories will still be there. But I know myself and I know exactly what I’m doing. Why I’m doing. Why I’m clutching at/towards my past even if the past wasn’t part of the past actually at all and instead is present. How my childhood may be somewhat personified and that’s comforting too as my actual past finally succumbs to its mortal wounds. Where home somehow finds itself not in walls and staircases and under-the-stairs coat closets, but in fellow travelers who understand it all, who came from some place similar. Because my house is dying and no one else seems to care.

To everyone else it’s just a house. To me it is my first best friend, my first confidant, my first lover. I don’t know how to say goodbye. But it makes me cripplingly ill, deep in my gut. I want to save her. These walls that creak and the trees that sway in the violent storms and the floors that are still surely soaked from loneliness and blaming myself for everything yet somehow today they soothe me. You’d think I’d want to run away and never look back. But I don’t like change. I don’t want to say goodbye. I want someone to hold me and be here and understand why this has me so, so broken. This house is more me than I am, and soon she will take her last breath, soon she will be gone. And I’ll mourn her alone, my tears seeping into the air, no more carpeting to soak up the floods that pour daily, on the regular, and in this case due to the death of me.

I am my home, and I always will be. I’ll never be able to come home again.