A lot of moving

I was going to work on other writing, but I found myself headed here first. Despite the fact that this wifi situation is laughable and that I’m alone in the pitch black living room with my laptop and makeshift bed, I still needed a different kind of closure: one of a written, personal nature. So here it is. I guess. 

I’m leaving tomorrow morning for Rochester— by seven-thirty, at the latest, by my mother’s decree. This is good, because it signifies a return to my “normal” life, a busy-ness and a whirlwind of activity. This is good for me. In other ways I am very much a hermit and prefer to laze and read and absorb and enjoy. The whirlwind forces me to enjoy from an active standpoint. 

I don’t like to leave the hermitage— the cloisters, if you will. My parents’ house— it sucks to call it that, now, but this is my first very real move away out of the house with all of my furniture and run-on sentences— my parents’ house is out in the country, five minutes by car from civilization. I love it there. I don’t think it’s far enough away from people, personally, but it’s as far as I can get at this point and I wouldn’t have it any other way. My summer has been a peaceful time of very low emotional and/or mental stress for me, and a huge, relaxing blessing. 

 And it’s over. Tomorrow, it’s over, and I leave my family for the Real World again. And this time I’m taking almost all of my belongings with me. I’m moving out. 

Things are changing. I have my first “real,” named role in an Eastman show. I’m also in a student-run performance/collaboration. I’m also Eastman’s student body president, and I also have a job where I make real money on campus. Things are changing, and things are happening. 

I guess I just have to come to terms with the fact that they will also be happening at home, and I won’t be there to witness. My sister is entering her junior year of high school. My mother has a birthday soon that will turn her an even number that ends in a zero. My grandmother isn’t going to have me there to saw branches off the crabapple tree or lilac bush, or to rip stubborn shrubbery out of her yard. Granted, my mother is just as capable of doing this, but she is beyond busy. 

I’m going to have to watch as one of my co-volunteers accepts a position on the Hollywood board: we have worked together since the current board has been together, really, and now he gets to call shots and be even more involved, and I will only be able to drop in whenever I’m in the neighborhood. I feel neglectful. In addition, I have to wait and worry about my old dog at home. He’s eleven now, and allergic to life and tired of the puppy. I feel like I have to wait and worry about everyone. 

I should feel excited, and I do— but the work ahead of me is daunting and I feel as though life is going to move on, yet again, without me. This summer at home, I feel as though I might have just barely managed to catch up with it. I should have known that it wouldn’t be for long.