old haunts - from november of last year
Saturday, Nov. 03, 2012 @ 6:50 p.m.

my haunted room is empty. i wonder if my ghost will stay, if he has anywhere else to go.

the furniture is sold, my dad's record collection, our board games. pots, plants, cabinets, decades of books and national geographic magazines and even our old sega master system, gone. and soon the house itself, and the porch where we listened to quiet music and watched the stars slide slowly toward the horizon. a little drunk, my first time. content.

if i were there, standing in the empty house and holding the keys, i don't know if the time would ever feel right to leave and lock the door behind me. the farm where my imagination and i grew up, where my home has been all these years and where i've always felt the most like myself. i won't miss sitting by the electric heater in the kitchen to warm my hands and toes, or running for the bus down the driveway that never ends. i won't miss my ghost. i'll miss everything else. the hills, the ponds, the trees. the pet spider in the downstairs bathroom. washing dishes in front of a perfect picture window. my tire swing. my fields. my childhood.

twenty-two years of memories slide into the past. i feel weightless: like i'm in a car that went too quickly over the crest of a hill. the sensation is terrifying, is euphoric. the mementos i'd kept hidden away won't have a chance to remind me of why i kept them. they're gone. i will cut my losses and my gains and look to my future.

eva.

the child-genius is asleep in her bedroom. i made her curtains. she painted her own artwork. bryan reads her bedtime stories every night. if i had to leave almost everything behind, how would i decide what to keep and what to give away? if i had to do what my parents did last week, and choose which of my childs' things she would want? everything is precious to me. everything is sacred. i couldn't do what they did, and not because i'd get it wrong. because i would keep everything. i couldn't be my mother, packing a tiny mirror-box full of records and pictures and books and games to ship across the country, inevitably shipping things that she would, herself, miss -- because she could only guess at what's important to me. i hope that i would know what eva would want to keep, but more desperately i just want to know her. i hold onto everything she gives me, even the intangible...like conversations about her friends and favourites, about when she's happy, scared, mad. i don't want to be like my mother. i don't want to have another baby so my first won't be alone. and i'm not saying that hypothetically: she told me it's cruel to only have one child. that i'm condemning her to loneliness.

but if i do this right, eva won't ever feel that way.

we stick together. i try to remember everything about her, even when she isn't changing. i know i miss a lot. i really didn't want to put her in daycare, so now i try to make every minute we spend together count for all the minutes we spend apart. she's so inquisitive, animated, eloquent, compassionate. perceptive. when someone is sad she cradles their face in her pudgy little hands, looks earnestly into their eyes and says 'no, don't be sad. i want to make a happy'. and although it is impossible to feel unhappy when she's with me, sometimes i pretend just so she'll do it.

i wish you could meet her. you would love her. you would understand better than anyone how important it is to be near her, to have her want to be near you. you and i find joy and beauty in the same things and she is full to bursting with both. when i think about you, it's nearly always because i want to share where i am. to show you the most important things, without having to explain what makes them important. and i know, or think i know, that you feel the same. we share an emptiness that has nothing to do with the space around us and everything to do with that hole the other left when they went away.

we are each others' living proof that you can never leave everything behind.