Queen of Peaches

I often like to boast about how infrequently I’ve moved during my life.

There was the house in Indiana I grew up in. The same dorm room for all four years of college. And just three apartments during my nearly thirteen years in Chicago.

Looks simple, right? Looks like I don’t ever move anywhere, right? Looks like my life could be described with a very linear narrative arc focused on my tendency to get grounded in one place and stay there until absolutely compelled to leave, right?

Well, as with any story I tell myself over and over again, I’ve started to realize that it’s not actually the whole truth. I’ve started to realize that the places I lived during the liminal zones in between those big, stable chunks of time are actually some of the most vital parts of my life story. The temporary locales that aren’t as easily defined as “places” where I lived, more like stopping points, are nevertheless key sites where I spent significant time and learned significant lessons. Reviewing them now, they provide unmistakable evidence that gives lie to my insistence that I only feel comfortable if I can put down roots, that I like to be surrounded by my stuff, that I inherited my father’s lack of flexibility, that I suck at moving, that it’s hard for me to find the adventure that my heart yearns for.

How do I quantify the influence of the flat in London where I stayed during my summer studying abroad after my junior year of college? The influence of the insanely beautiful house in Bloomington that I lived in for a few months after I graduated from Indiana University while the married professors who owned it traveled for research? The adorably shitty apartment in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood where I crashed for a while with one of my best friends from high school, temping and going to movies while she traveled for business and while I waited to hear if I was going to get an internship at a high-profile magazine in New York? The spare bedroom in my maternal grandmother’s house where I lived for six months while she was rapidly dying of lung cancer? The two apartments in Chicago where I’ve unofficially lived with my boyfriend while I maintained the lease on my own studio apartment so that my high-functioning autistic sister could have somewhere safe to stay until she could be placed in her own housing for adults with disabilities?

These are all extremely important places in my life, but other than my memories and maybe a handful of photos (that are currently in storage because I’m, ahem, moving again soon), there’s basically no tangible record of my time spent in any of them. This is not the story of a person who has trouble with the idea of impermanence and rootlessness.

Even though the past three years of caring for my sister have been ridiculously stressful in so many ways, it was a complete blessing to walk into my apartment after she’d moved out and be struck with the realization that I didn’t give a crap about half the stuff that was still in there. The apartment had become a time capsule of my life circa 2012. The events that had driven me out of the apartment in the first place had now become the same events that had neutralized my perceived attachment to so much of what was in it. How elegant the effects of the passage of time!

And not only that, but there’s clearly a connection between how personally fulfilled I feel, how avidly and actively I’m creating and adventuring and loving, to how much I ultimately care about where I live and what I have. My being able to happily travel through London or bash around the Pacific Northwest with just a couple small suitcases proves that I carry my own groundedness and sense of at-home-ness with me. I allow other people to make me forget this truth at my own peril.

Long before I consciously started developing my skills as a clairvoyant, I used to joke that the only recurring dreams I ever had were about architecture. And it was true—location was usually the most powerfully felt feature of my dreams, the shape and layout and design of a building the aspects I would remember most vividly the next morning. And sometimes, months or years later, I would even see a place in real life that I’d long since forgotten that I’d once dreamed about. I think the first instance of this phenomenon occurred on a road trip through southern Indiana with my family when I was probably thirteen or fourteen.

“I had a dream about that house,” I matter-of-factly stated when we happened to drive past a beautiful, open, green clearing with a simple ranch house tucked back a nice bit from the road.

“No you didn’t,” my dad shot back. Not angrily or even incredulously. Just as simply and matter-of-factly as I had spoken up in the first place.

I wasn’t usually one to talk back all that much, even at that age, often assuming that there was so much about the world that I didn’t know, that it was best to trust the word of people who were older and thus had seen and experienced so much more of it than I had. So, I didn’t deny his denial. But I do remember very clearly thinking to myself as we sped away down the road, yes, I did. I know what I dreamed.

And so even though I am happy to be moving with my boyfriend to a gorgeous new apartment in a gorgeous new neighborhood, divested of so many of the things that I’d been dragging, with borrowed sentimentality, along behind me from both my childhood home and my grandmother’s home, I also know what I dreamed about the building that I’ve lived in for the past eleven years.

Both the two-bedroom where I lived for six years with roommates and the studio apartment I subsequently moved into across the hall were beautiful places to live and grow. I’ve expressed my gratitude to my landlady, and have energetically cut ties with the building itself, and have even sent some love back in time to myself circa 2004, to promise her that there’s so much juicy wonderfulness waiting to be experienced in this location and beyond.

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