The night is frenetic with sounds. Jazz on the street, neon rushing up. I want to dissolve and pour myself around my son like a protective coating covering his little hands, his delicate eyelids with veins like a network of rivers, lashes delicate like a forest of ferns. We are moving. Everything in my life is uprooting, the soil of familiar things, shaken out, scattered. We're transplanting to northern New England where in the summer people swarm the streets and the mountains nestle down into the valleys like sleeping dinosaurs.
This move is a sacrifice. We own a house now in a decent neighborhood in a wealthy CT county. It has three bedrooms and paint we love. Moving is a lesson in letting go of attachment to the comforts and accouterments of an life grown easy out of habit.
Our apartment is smaller, without a dishwasher, or the clean lines of newly laid floors, tile, slate. The apartment is on a dead end street about five blocks from downtown, in the bottom story of an old creaky colonial with slanting floors. We are on the bottom story and I can hear the people walking above us, the ceiling creaking under the rhythm of their movement. I can grow used to all of this, but I feel myself bucking up against this attachment. I feel my heart like a fish out of water, flailing at the loss of things familiar.
It will take pictures on the walls and rugs; and it will take hours of walking around downtown to feel at home here. To create new routines to cradle our little family.
Tonight I am sitting in the empty living room in a bendy Ikea chair as Bean sleeps in his stroller and DH talks to his brother on the phone from Japan. The fan slaps around in lazy spinning circles. The shades are drawn. The house feels cool now, with a few windows open to the night air, cooler after the thunderstorms came.
This is the shape of my life now: living into this transitional time, and embracing it. I am afraid of the introduction phases of things. Afraid to meet people for the first time, to put myself out there in the terrain of risk and unfamiliarity. But my goal is to face this and alter this aspect of my personality: each time the fear rises, instead of backing down, confront it. I want to meet people. I want to join a mommy & me yoga class, and a biking group. I want to meet people at the Y, meet people everywhere. And here, for the first time, I see people everywhere that I would like to know.