Alchemic Verse

Before I leave a place behind, it’s important to me to feel it wholly. To understand and experience what it is, to know what letting it go will mean. I’ve always said goodbye and thank you to the places that have sheltered me, however temporary – hotel rooms to states, even cars.

Everywhere I’ve even visited, I’ve tried to hold in my memory before it is lost, deliberately, two hands white knuckling the feelings, aromas, how the light fills the space. If enough time spent, the weather of each passing season, the experiences.

Tonight, I’m sitting on a folding lawn chair, the last seat in my house, at a folding outdoor table on which this laptop rests. A severe thunderstorm shoots cracks into the slate of the obscured sunset, thunder at a near- constant rumble peaking occassionally to resonate with the materials of the home that sheltered me for the past 3 years. I am so tired I can barely keep my eyes open [it’s 8:22pm], my body is covered in bruises from the physical labor of moving, my muscles feel sinewy and sore.

Three years can sound like a short or a long time depending on your experiences, but these three years were nothing short of transformative, if in increasing intensity as time slid into the final year. This place held the gamut of human emotion in its walls, joy through despair, every genre, subgenre, and flavor in the spectrum. Laughter rattled its windows, so did shouting, loud music, the dog barking excitedly, the sound of my singing when I felt free enough to try.

There are a lot of windows here, though how unwelcome I felt to be seen or myself kept shades down in most rooms, wide open in the sunroom where I currently sit, where so many colors and varieties of flowers bloomed. Much of the light feels amber, but the sunsets and their colors create magical dusks where hues shift. Right now, as the thunderstorm has briefly lulled to rain, the caste is green as the sun starts to dip low enough to thread the tops of the houses and filter through the bottom of the anvils of cloud. Other days, flamingo pink, neon orange, streetlight yellow.

The seasons included unpredictable springs that felt too short, hot summers that felt too long, the magic of autumn’s cool breezes and fiery fading colors, and a mix of both easy winters and hard ones, feet of snow, ice storms. Through it all, this strong and comfortable house nearly never lost power, even in the harshest of storms.

Admittedly, the aromas I loved best were fewest, the incense or wax melts, or candles I had burning, themed to play with the light and colors of the season. I do like how my dog smells? She’s stinky, but the warmth of her stank is one of very few comforts that can heal almost anything.

The storm is kicking up and the windows are rattling with the downpour. Now empty of almost everything that blended life into the shelter, the echoes make the cachophany a blanket over my senses. The past nearly two weeks I’ve been spending each evening on deck, sunset after sunset, moonrise to moonrise. The days were a heatwave, snapping to a day so cold it felt like October, and some of the most extraodinary storms, clouds, shooting stars.

I’m leaving this home. And, not just this house and its three years, but this neighborhood, this town, this state, many people and places I’ve known for nearly all of my life, 30+ years. This has meant paring down my idea of home to something that can fit in my car, a storage unit for later, and whatever else fits in my skull and ribcage. If home can be carried within me, at least for a time, I can unroll the map and find where I might belong.

And I will thank and say goodbye to every room, rental, stop along the way with the same devotion to honoring the time I spent in its shelter.