Going, going…

I can’t say anything is certain, but we’re probably going to sell our house. Sure, an investment is nice, when you can have someone else paying the mortgage for you. But we’re not sure we’re cut out to be landlords. How many extra mortgage payments can we afford, if the house sits empty for months between renters? If the tenants fall behind on the mortgage, would we want to be responsible for evicting them? What about all the necessary maintenance, if we keep the house for the long haul? And then, 20 years of this sort of headache, just for relatively meager monthly revenue, when the mortgage is paid off? Maybe we should play the Asian market instead.
There’s the symbolic break as well, and selling the house would surely be the final goodbye to my home town. Aside from my grandparents, and a few friends, there will be nothing to bring us back. It’s strange to think of, because this place always has been home, but now it won’t be. By owning a house here, there’s always the notion, utterly unrealistic but comforting, that I could fit back in my old life. There’s the continuity of it, and the idea that all the different parts of my life could form a cohesive unit. If I move to a different place, life becomes segmented, and there’s nothing to connect the new to the old.
I have mixed feelings about the finality of it. I know this town so well. Every place holds a memory, and soon the memories will lose their grounding. They’ll become something unreal, existing in my mind only, and maybe I’ll start to wonder if my early life ever really happened. Without something concrete, to reach out and touch, surely the line between fact and fiction will blur. God willing, I’ve a long life ahead if me. Here, I’m leaving behind perhaps 1/3 of it. I’ll be a ghost, revisiting life now not only through time, but also through place.
Most people, I know, leave home at some point, and move easily and happily into the next stage of life. I suppose they point their feet forward, and don’t pine for the past that slips away. But it ceases to exist, if you see what I mean, and I find that alarming. I don’t like this feeling. I don’t like ghosts in my memories; it becomes so difficult to discern reality. The kids who rode bikes up and down Washington Street? The mailman that passed out candy? The grouchy man on the porch swing? Once real, now inexistent. And maybe, probably, this is me brooding about mortality again. Leave it to me to see every significant event as another step toward the grave.
The funny part is that I’ve been dying to get out of here for years and years. This town is small and it’s suffocating me. When I look toward the future, I see clearly the only direction is out. I’m creating a life with my husband and son, and that is reality. This is what exists now, and what will exist tomorrow, and next year, and as far as I can see down the road. Yet decisions, even inevitable decisions, never come easily. Something will always be lost.