back and forth, forever.

These days I work in the same neighbourhood I went to highschool in. It's a bit of a mindfuck, albeit a pleasant one. I love the feeling of bumping up against my past all the time, I really do. Walking streets I used to know, taking shortcuts and remembering classes missed, fears realized, hearts broken. I'm not one of those people who has a particular nostalgia for highschool itself (the opposite is true, in fact), but I sure do look back fondly on the emotional education I got during those years.

The neighbourhood I work in is also close to Hamilton's only university. There are student houses everywhere, couches on porches, pickup trucks full of beer parked nearly perpendicular across ill-paved driveways. It gives the streets a pleasantly anarchic feeling that I find comforting. Yesterday things were even more ridiculous and messy than usual--April 30th, move-out day. As I walked around on my lunch break, I saw countless U-Hauls, decimated Ikea shelves, frustrated mothers and methodical fathers, young adults hauling armloads of clothes and pillows down rickety front steps. I heard in their voices that particular mix of relief at the end of another school year, and resignation to the fact that they would be spending the next four months in a childhood bedroom, suddenly accountable again after a year of total independence. Those are strange times, liminal times. Times between times, when you're not really sure who or where you are. Are you a student, mature and thoughtful and On Your Way Somewhere, or are you a daughter, dependent and uncertain and skulking back home? You don't really know, not when you're filling a borrowed truck with all your worldly goods, saying goodbye to the best people you've ever met.

Watching it all unfold, I couldn't help but think back to the many move-homes I've known. The one that came to mind immediately was the very first, in May, 2000. I had spent a transformative, sketchy, unforgettable year living at St. Hilda's College, surrounded by amazing women and annoying girls (and some who were both at the same time), across the street from the boys' residence, where we'd go for meals and beers and general insanity. A few weeks before the end of term I'd started dating a boy who felt different than the others. We liked all the same bands. We read all the same books. For weeks before we even kissed we'd stay up nearly all night talking about everything and nothing. Sometimes he'd call me on the phone and we'd talk that way for hours, even though he lived right across the street. I was falling in love with him, just as I'd fallen in love with the friends I'd made and the life I'd somehow forged for myself. I did not want to go. The prospect of leaving him, leaving my friends, leaving the tiny basement room that was now my home, terrified me. I was heading back to my real home, a place so unfamiliar to me now that it might as well have been Siberia.

One quiet Friday night my dad drove in to haul home my last load. The boy I couldn't get enough of had left for his parents' house Oshawa earlier that day, and already I felt like I was missing a limb. Before he left I thought about telling him how deep my feelings for him went, but I couldn't get the words out. The uncertainty hung between us as he walked away, hovered around me as I finished packing up my room before Dad got there. I remember those last few minutes, bringing the final boxes upstairs, cramming them into the back of the car, and then just standing there crying. A handful of the girls with whom I'd shared the last eight months were still around, and we all hugged and bawled like a bunch of tweens leaving summer camp. The air was warm and the sun was setting. My dad waited patiently in the driver's seat as I sloppily bid farewell to the best year of my life. As we drove back to Hamilton, further from my Toronto life, further from my eastbound love, I sunk back into the passenger side, exhausted. Everything that mattered felt so far away. In hindsight, it was the end of the beginning.

Of course I didn't know it yet, but that absence would make the heart grow fonder. I'd spend that summer working at the library. Nearly every night I'd run off to one place or another, often ending up in one of the same parks I'd spent my highschool years running off to. I wasn't looking for trouble the way I had been when I was younger, just a soft place to land. Every weekend I'd find myself either getting on a train or meeting one, following the path to my secret heart. Each time we'd see each other we'd get closer; each time we said goodbye it would get harder. Every train ride away from him made me feel like I was living that last day in front of St. Hilda's over again, dying another death, letting another great and wonderful thing come to an end. Come September we'd land back in each other's arms and vow to stay there for the rest of our lives. It would be exhilarating and terrifying and I would feel more alive and more secure than I'd ever thought possible.

That part wouldn't last either. I guess the point is, nothing does. Like it or not, we're bound to spend much of our lives in these liminal states, between things, between stops, between homes and great loves and times both hard and good. The silver lining, I think, is that eventually you get it. Eventually you see the changes coming, see that they're part of something bigger than you, know that you are strong enough to handle them. Eventually you make yourself your own anchor, and just hold on.