Y.S.T.

It's so strange when a room is reduced to four white walls.

After spending a good portion of my day cleaning out dried soy sauce from a refrigerator (thanks, worthless pad thai eating hydra-for-roommate), driving a moving van that could comfortably carry approximately three African elephants, and feeding boys jelly donuts in exchange for their brawn, it's finally over. I'm out of my first home outside of home. And it was a good one, a great one, a scary one, and a sad one. Sometimes I saw it as a sanctuary, others, a witch's tower. I can't say for certain how I've changed since moving into that house one year ago, mainly because I don't think we ever truly recognize it in ourselves, even in hindsight. But that could just be because I may be made of granite. Who knows.

The point remains that, regardless of if the leasing agents see the wad of now black spearmint gum in the corner of the living room that I tried to conceal with white-out, or the lingering odor of kitty litter from the fireplace, my presence in that house is gone. Reduced to nothing, not even a whisper. After picking up the last bits of trash from my room that my vacuum missed, (an oyster cracker and a turquoise sequin, respectively) there was nary a trace of life. Just eggshell. I wanted to cry. And for whatever reason, I felt like I was made of evaporated milk. Did this past year actually happen? Where was it?

(To be honest, I did cry. To be even more honest, I cried a lot.)

As I was busy spewing a salty cocktail of oils, mucin, and water onto my freshly cleaned carpet and lamenting a year I had so fatally declared "lost," I could hear the grunts of those downstairs lugging my mattress to the truck. Some of them were familiar, others were new. Some, like my cousin Cooper, I had accidentally dropped on a coffee table when I was ten, others I had just recently met. And it struck me then, I guess, that my instrument for gauging a year was wrong. I'll always remember floor plans (as I toted Architectural Digest as much as I did Highlights when I was younger), but those don't really make a life or a memory. Like Shakespeare said, at best, the world is a stage. Place isn't definitive of memory, but rather people. At least that's how I see it. It's the grunts of those downstairs who help you move from A to B (and unfortunately also those that keep you too long in A and make you late for B) that act as place markers. The nights you spend putting foam rubber stickers on your forehead just because, the days you spend tripping on takeout boxes and musical instruments, or the morning you spend picking up used tissues and bottles of wine. Those, to me, are more permanent than any room could ever be.

In short, I'm still going to miss this house nestled among a retirement home, a middle school, and a university, but walls are everywhere. I'll miss its front porch, I won't miss its tacky italian chef plates that were glued to the walls, yet surprisingly enough, I will miss the confetti-colored walls of the basement. But that's it. The rest I'm taking with me.