A love letter, to the house that saw me grow into the woman I am today.
Jeeze, I'm closer to 30 than I am 17, and yet it still feels so weird to call myself a woman. Like I haven't achieved that title fully yet. Anyone else? Moving on..
We all have those periods in our lives, where you look back on now and go wow, have I ever grown since that time. There's the obvious ones: childhood, adolescence, the devil known as puberty, high school graduation, and so forth. Well, what about the stages in life that make you grow, but aren't "landmark"? Those periods that twist you and turn you and mold you into a completely different person? Looking back on myself when I was 18, I'm (THANK GOD) not that person anymore. But looking back at who I was when I was 21, she's like a whole other lifetime to me, too.
We listed my condo this week. The condo I bought when I was just a little baby adult at 21. that was purchased with the help of my parents, and with the help of my late grandmother. It saw me get my first "real job", it saw me unexpectedly unemployed and panicking on how to make ends meet (hint, thank god for serving). It saw me break free from a relationship that wasn't working for anyone, and in those months that followed, it saw me really find my independence and my own voice. I never expected that I would live alone alone ever, but this house and I did it. We paid every bill on time by ourselves, we never asked for help. Sometimes we ate popcorn for dinner, but in the end we did it. I did it. The baby child who doesn't like getting dirty or putting in the hard work, it saw me work hard. But since Jake moved in, well, this little house that could has been outgrown by us. We're yearning to close this chapter in our lives to see how it looks to be real adults with a yard that our future babies can play in. Plus, we want a big fur baby, real bad.
But when I stop and think about this house, it is so bittersweet for me to leave it. A little 5 year piece of my soul is in these walls, through the laughter and tears, the many many happy memories and some of the different heartbreaks the walls have seen.
Making a leap from the comfort to the unknown is always scary, and I just want to say: thank you house, thank you for teaching me to get by on my own, thank you for proving that I can. Thank you for not having a dishwasher because damn, I don't think I'll love an appliance more now that I've washed roughly 641,728 dishes by hand. Thank you for not having ac anywhere other than the living room, it made for some great, unbearably hot Okanagan summer forts come August. Thank you for the neighbors we really don't like across the fence, it made for entertaining people watching when they took their embarassing domestics outside. Thank you for the glorious vine that no matter how many times the landscapers got rid of, it came back in all its majestic form. Thank you for the unreal tattletale strata committee I got lucky enough to be a part of, it taught me the benefits of biting my tongue and picking my battles. Honestly though, no thank you to that god awful lighting you have in the kitchen - that shit is horrific.