Home is an odd thing, especially when your task is to remove it of all traces of your life there.
All my stuffed animals? Most given away, a few I can’t bear to part with bagged up and ready to come home.
The giant piles of magazines? In the trash or boxed up.
All my old clothes? Mostly given to Goodwill.
No posters, no pictures, just the good old splatter wallpaper that has served me so well for 11 years.
Even the Christmas tree, which sat undisturbed but the occasional sprouting of a new ornament, in the living room for ten years, is gone.
The dust from the crap at the bottom of my closet has decided that I don’t get a choice on how long I’m going to work. I’m taking a break right now or it’s going to try and kill me.
I don’t recall being allergic to dust until recently, but I certainly have become so. And it’s really pissing me off, as 21 years worth of dust and disgustingness gets released into my room.
It’s rather difficult to be nostalgic when you’re so sick of trying to put everything away that your overriding thought is “Fuck this stupid house!”
I’m quite ready to head back to Chicago with an overloaded car, watch the poor old Wildcats get the living shit kicked out of them all over the football field, but I’m still sad to see the house go.
I think part of the reason it hasn’t hit me that the house is really going is that my mom still has most of her furniture out.
It’s difficult to sell an unfurnished house nowadays, since as my stepmom (house unsold for almost a year and a half) puts it, “People just have no imaginiation anymore.”
No, people don’t have the time to think about their own decorating schemes and where wonderful things would go. They’ve got the money, but they have to work so much to get it that by the time they finally get home, they just want furniture.
Decorating schemes, except for the idle rich, are out this season.
So I think until I pull away from the house for the last time as my house, I’m not really going to realize it’s gone.
But right now it’s just me versus the dust bunnies. And the dust bunnies are winning.
So now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go hack up a lung.