I just called to shut off the power at my apartment. The rent is still paid through the end of the month, and I have a few things left there to be brought to the house, but basically my life there is over.
Yesterday morning I stopped by to grab a few more things, and as I climbed the steps to the third floor, the steps I climbed every day to what was once my home, I was amazed by how much I didn't care, by my complete lack of nostalgia or sentimentality, or feelings of any kind.
How unlike me. I lived in this place for years. Shouldn't I be lost in some hazy reverie? I can't say I ever loved it there, but at least initially, so much about it--the clunky old Otis elevator, the authentic Murphy bed--appealed to me. It was a perfect temporary place. But time passed, and I stayed, inertia my dominant state. It suited me there, or so I wanted to believe. Besides, I wasn't going to live in Des Moines forever. No sense putting down roots when that gypsy highway would be calling me. Eventually.
But that call never came, and I stayed, nested, or perhaps entombed. Nothing really challenged me, inspired me to leave until I met Tabbatha. We looked for places together, and suddenly my eyes were opened. Even though she tore out my heart and threw it on the ground, I still have to give her credit: Through her, I realized that I likely wasn't going anywhere, that I was here, and this was likely where I was meant to be. She made the idea of being rooted sound appealing. Of course, that realization came out of a desire to be rooted with her, to start a family and have a life I'd never imagined. Some kind of normalcy, which for me would be an unimaginably exotic adventure.
Well, the happy family thing may not have happened, but the whole experience led me here, to my own house, a place to finally call my own. And a weird sense of domesticity has enveloped me. My neighbor told me I could borrow her snow blower, which means a) I'm thinking of snow blowers, and, more shockingly, b) I'm talking to my neighbor. Which is no big deal for most people, but I have no experience doing this sort of thing, I might as well be flying the Millenium Falcon or something, and though I have no clue what I'm doing, it's kind of fun.
