The Night Before

I was six and we were moving across the globe like a band of nomads. 


That night we slept on the living room floor of my childhood home, in a room full of boxes, sleeping bags and pillows, and the awful tangible feeling of imminent change. Mine was a pink sleeping bag among the browns and mauves of the living room, and in the morning we flew across the seas to a land of spice and the distinct smell of plastic and tobacco.

Since that night there have been many nights-before, all as strange and exciting and dreadful as the first. Nights spent in cramped hotel rooms before cross-country moves, night spent navigating through box mazes in hauntingly empty houses, and last supper barbecues with family on summer nights, facing a first move with a new husband, choking down the fear of the homesick and trying desperately to be a big girl. 

Here we are again. This time the boxes are mine, and the hauntingly empty house, too. My Holbs takes the dogs for one last walk through the neighborhood and the house is empty but for the sound of my quiet thoughts.

I pass through echoing bedrooms, sweeping up the last traces of evidence that we were here; bits of fabric in the studio, a few of my hairs in the bedroom, a couple escapee earring backs in the closet. 

I stop for a moment in my room of dreams, my broom suspended in mid air. As I look around the room I am aware that it isn't really my room of dreams anymore. Now it belongs to someone else, and suddenly I can see the chipped paint on the window sill, the dents in the floor boards, the scuffs on the hardwoods. It is just a room. My dreams don’t live here anymore.

I haul the air mattress into the living room and bunker down to await a freshly walked husband and dogs. In the quiet of a house that’s no longer mine I welcome the strange and familiar sensations of a night before a move. That feeling of imminent change, so tangible and awful, right there on my tongue. That desire to hold onto every passing moment, to memorize it and bury it deep somewhere I can never lose it. That attempt to remember what the rooms looked like when we once belonged here, before they became empty and haunted by our ghosts. That sensation of these last four years sinking deep into my bones through my skin, as the night gently cools the summer heat from the pavement, and the heat of our ghosts from the walls of this house.