Going home

It's pretty unusual, I think, that I can - if I want to - go back to the house I grew up in.

But then, it's pretty unusual that I spent a substantial part of my adult life in that house too. We moved there in 1985, a week before I turned 6, and I lived there until 1997, when I went to college in August, oddly enough a week before my 18th birthday. (I had graduated from high school the previous summer; but I didn't get into the one college I applied to - because my girlfriend had applied there - and so I waited until the next year to apply to other schools.) I... actually had kind of a complicated couple years, living-situation-wise, about six months of which was spent in that house; I went back to college; dropped out again (turns out that ADHD plus the need to have a job to support a partner and a newborn kills your ability to perform in college), moved back to that house for a couple years, went back to college again, graduated that time, spent a couple years married to someone I should never have said yes to, moved back again and spent... let's see, 2012-2019, so seven years there, and then moved to the house I'm living in now.

So of the years I've been alive, that's 12 plus 0.5 plus three plus seven is 22.5 years living in that house. I'm 44. So more than half my life.

My parents don't live there anymore; they moved out in 2003. None of my siblings live there. We still own it, but it stands empty, a testament to a life we lived and loved and can't quite let go of.

I could go home. But it wouldn't be the home I loved.