Isn’t it funny how day by day nothing changes, but when you look back everything is different? – C.S. Lewis
Last weekend, a friend of mine who is hunting for her first home asked me to attend an open house with her. As we walked through the house, I was reminded of my own house-shopping process, only a year earlier. I began to miss the process: the nightly browsing for new listings (something I had been doing for fun for nearly ten years anyway), arranging showings, the hope when something new popped up. I even began to miss the anxiety of writing offers, wondering if this house would be the one.
After the open house, I arrived home with a new sense of boredom. Walking through the front door, I saw the same walls I’d seen every day for nearly a year. I saw the same furniture in the same layout — the same couch in the living room, scratched to death on one side by my cat, layered over the same hand-me-down rug I’ve had for five years and have wanted to replace for nearly as long — and couldn’t resist the pull of a new house. I opened Zillow, knowing that we wouldn’t be purchasing another home barely a year after purchasing our first one, but overwhelmed by the urge to see what was out there.
Transitional seasons have always been my favorite and I wonder now if this is because of my penchant for change. Spring helps us thaw only moments before the frostbite would have set in, and Fall comes to relieve us of our summer sunburns. I wonder if what I’d really gotten sick last weekend of was the cold, dreary April weather, if I’d gotten bored by Spring’s reluctance to show up this year. If, in searching for a new house, I was searching for an escape not from my home, but from the life I’ve come to know within its walls.
Stability always seems to manifest this way for me; instead of finding comfort in the security of sameness, I desperately search for ways to upend it. One April years ago, struck once again by the urge to get a cat, I ended up moving to a new, cat-friendly apartment — halfway across the country — on what most people would consider a whim. I wonder if it is in my nature to crave and create change, or if it was instilled in me as a child.
I remember weekends with my mom and my aunt spent rearranging the living room as a small child. As I got older, I remember dangling a pencil through a hole in the floor to make it easier for whoever was downstairs to find the hole for the cable after moving the TV to a new wall. I remember constantly swapping out the kitchen table and chairs in search of the pairing that would fit best both the style and function of the room. I remember getting off the bus at the corner in middle school, so my friend could walk the distance to our neighboring homes together, cutting through the easement I took to get home, and being momentarily afraid that I had walked into the wrong yard when I was met with green siding instead of the blue paint, so faded it was almost white, that I had known in the years since we bought the house.
Change has always been so woven into the fabric of my life that I start to wonder if I crave it to an unhealthy degree — craving a foreign state when a different apartment would do, and a new house when what I really needed was to wait for a warmer day. And yet I know that no matter what changes, there is always a tiny part of me that will wish it hadn’t. I can’t appreciate the new shops and apartments in the town where I grew up without mourning the trees they cut down to build them. I even miss the abandoned buildings: one near the train tracks, crumbling and overgrown, where I took my senior pictures, which has since been replaced with a seafood restaurant, and another on the road to my elementary school, where they ran out of money before finishing the project, leaving an empty, half-constructed structure for over a decade before someone else bought it and put in a brewery.
I’m trying to become more comfortable with sameness, with walking into the same living room, and with knowing where the furniture will be when I get up to go to the bathroom at night. I’m trying to be more comfortable with sameness, because I know that one day I’ll wake up and everything will be different.
And in a way, that day is every day.
the most pleasant nightmares
I had two dreams about the same person
who I thought when I woke I remembered
learning about until you told me she isn’t real
I had a dream that everything was
as I left it
that the evidence of me and my family
hadn’t been erased overnight
women’s work
I won’t think about all of the men
who have wronged me
not in the ways that you’d think
some by being there
some by not
some by calling me only by mistake
at 4:00 in the morning
they’re killing my ferns
when they said healing wouldn’t be linear
I wasn’t expecting such a circle
I’m afraid if I sneeze I’ll pee my pants
I’m afraid if I don’t I’ll lose an eye
I found out the tree you said was an ash
was a maple just before they cut it down
and left me to burn in the sun
Oops I didn’t realize until just now that I didn’t take any pictures this week of anything except my cat sleeping. Plenty of Fridays for your Friday.
If you’re not privy to the paid tier, it comes out every Monday and is full of a slew of fun things, like poetry readings, listicles, journal prompts, and hopefully next week, if I can get my shit together, vlogs. If that sounds interesting, you can get a free trial for a week, or pay for a full month or a year. And if it doesn’t, then I’ll see you right here next Friday. Feel free to bring a friend.