The Long Sweet Goodbye

Today was moving day. Sigh. I have a tendency to romanticize everything, so bare with me.

I am sitting ina completely empty apartment. My kids are with my husband and I am here to collect the cat and the hamster. It is so quiet and clean. Two things that it seemed to never be when we lived here. And now, like all the other times in my life that I have packed it all up and moved on to different spaces, I am forced to feel all at once sad and calm. My daughter learned to walk and talk here. My son built animal habitats here. My husband and I made love and fought, with equal intensity, here. How weird that it will be someone else’s space in just a few weeks. People that have never met us. People that we will never meet. They will be in what was our home. Not just our apartment, but our home. A place that my family will look at in photos and talk about when we are older… “You remember that lovely apartment we lived in.. the one with the balcony looking out onto a busy city street.. the one when we were so young and struggling…” We won’t remeber the long walk up three flights of stairs with anything other than fondness. In time, we won’t remember the leaky pipes that would once a month flood our kitchen floor. We won’t remember the loud, sloppy neighbors.. We will only remember the pretty flowers that bloomed outside our bathroom window. And we will only remember watching the squirrels build their nests and have their babies off our balcony. We will only remember the dancing in the living room… I guess that’s the way it should be.

The move is official. Today was the day. On to a different chapter in our book. Here’s to moving on.