Bye bye, Forest Ave
This is one of the very last nights I’ll ever sleep in this house. My mother bought it the summer I was 16, in 2014. I went off to boarding school that fall and came back in November for the holiday to the new house. I lived here during the “gap year” I took after I left boarding school. I did acid for the first time in this bedroom, looking at those posters on that wall. I thought I died then; it seemed as though it would last forever. It ended too quickly.
I don’t know where I’m going now. Once again, I’m setting out on a journey. This is travelling, once more. From the top this time: on recommence. I’ve been stripping back the things from my mother’s house: a little less here, a little less there. These are the repressed possessions I didn’t get rid of when I was traveling or at school because I expected to be able to keep them here. Not anymore, I can’t; these storage vaults are emptied. I’m setting up a new apartment, but like everywhere I live, it’s provisional. I don’t have any intent of staying here — famous last words. Moving is hell, and I have a collection.
If I may say something heretical (and I think I can, since this is my own log): I don’t know what to do with my mother’s collection. It’s beautiful and full of memories. It represents a great deal of what was in my house as a child. And it isn’t her. It’s the silly t-shirts with slogans, the little jewelry, the crafts I made that she kept that remind me of her, more than the antiques. I don’t know — I have begun to get rid of these things. My child craft projects, little collages and pictures I made in elementary school. What are these things? Are they me? I remember making them, but I don’t miss them when I’m not looking at them. I already tossed some of them, and I’ll certainly get rid of more. But I hate to get rid of evidence of who I was. And there’s the matter of her antiques: the furniture, the posters, the rugs, the sopramobile. I inherited an airplane propeller.
She is dead. That is what it is. It is what it is. She is what she is. What she is is dead. Ah well. Loss. Gain. I’m sad that she won’t see what I get up to next, as though she missed some of the reward of raising me. I know it was hard. I know she didn’t want me to know. It hurt her when I said I was hard to raise. I was hard to raise. A lot went on that she didn’t know how to handle. A lot goes on that no one knows how to handle. We’re all doing the best we can with the sense we have. Or “we’ve got.” I don’t remember how she used to say it. Maybe she used to say it both ways. Kathleen says “the sense we have at the time.” It’s true: the sense you have isn’t something outside of time, but something that changes and grows. I’m changing and growing. My mother isn’t changing any more: she’s dead.
I’m going to miss this house because it reminds me of her. But I won’t miss it any more than I miss the other houses she and I lived in. And this was never really my home anyway: she lived here, but I didn’t ever stay here permanently. I was always a guest, and I knew when I’d stayed too long. I’ve stayed here long enough. I’m ready to move out. I’m ready for it to be over. I’m not ready for her to be gone.
Gone?
