Sunday, December 11, 2011

In Need of an Avian Constitution

    I hate moving, as long as I can remember I have hated moving.  It probably started when, at the age of eight, I moved from the San Jose, California home in which I had grown up, to Crescent City, deep in the green of the Northern Californian redwoods.  That first move left me traumatized and was followed by nine more assorted residences over the course of the next eight years.  At twenty I left Salinas, California and moved back to San Jose where I lived in three places across the span of eighteen years, the last of which I was in for fourteen and only left because I got married and my husband lives in Monterey.  Six weeks ago I moved into my husband's apartment, a gorgeous two bedroom place with a front porch that directly overlooks the pool, the extending view reaching across a lake and well tended cemetary grounds.  As I write this my husband is packing, packing because we are moving.  I hate moving so I'm writing this blog instead of helping him. 
    So what is it that I detest so intensely that I literally feel physically unwell as all this upheaval is happening?  It would probably be wise of me to reach deep into my little kid memories and rest on a moment that I can recall clearly though it happened nearly thirty years ago.  This particular moment is when the utter reality, of what happens to what is familiar and feels safe, when one moves, sunk in.  I sobbed and sobbed on my bed, inconsolable, devastated that I missed my best friend Melissa, it was all that I could tell my mother, that I missed Melissa.  I feel that emotion as I type the phrase, I sob like a lonely eight year old. 
    My life will never be the same.  Everything that I love about now is going to change.  All that I am sure about when I wake up in the morning is that I won't know what comes next.  There will be new people who don't know me yet, new experiences, challenges and ways of arranging furniture.  These are the thoughts that scurry about in my head, anxious, thieving thoughts that are commiting serious larceny with the joy that ought to reside in the grand Palace of Possibility.  But why can't I incarcerate the thief, tuck it away in the folds of expectation, excitement and anticipation that can be the reality of moving? 
    When we are too enamored with Now we forfeit the gifts that tomorrow is always bearing.  I'm all for living in the Now but not when its the only reality that you are willing to experience.  And this is what has happened to me today, I am emotionally detaching from Now and surrendering to What Comes Next, I'm grieving Now and I do it under the guise of hating moving.  We all hate giving up what we love but if I hadn't given up the last man I loved I wouldn't have ever been able to experience the amazing, tender patience with which my husband now tends my inconsolability.  I wouldn't have married him, I would have sat in my San Jose studio and turned old and gray while longing for India.
    So I'll relinquish Now to my mental scrapbook, cherish sleeping in until noon, having my husband home twenty-two hours a day.  Cherish the hookah smoking, lazy days, X-files marathons and our fights over who does the dishes.  Cherish our firepace and water pressure problems, the sound of the sea lions when we open the front door.  Cherish all those expensive nights at Lallapalooza's and the cheap ones at the Farmer's Market, the two old bookstores, Game Habitat, downtown walks, the treacherous nature of the Trader Joe's parking lot.  I have loved living in Monterey, this I don't have to give up.
    I'm never going to like moving and that is ok, its a heck of a lot of work and really, I'd much rather sit here and type.