Moving Day

As a kid growing up in a military family, and a family that rented houses instead of buying them, you learn how to pack up and move rather well. I was a modern day nomad, never living in one place too long and I learned how to pack up my things in record time. I can pack up my apartment in less than three hours and we've packed up the family house in less than eight.

I've now lived in Minneapolis for eight consecutive years. I started getting antsy about four years ago but I find a strange comfort in this city. I know how to navigate it, it has just about everything in it you would want, there are charming mom and pop shops and malls for those who choose the mainstream, I've explored a lot of the city but there is so much left to see, and I have a family here. It's not your typical family but it's a group of people that usually accepts me for whom I am and still loves me despite that. Members of this family have come and gone and we drift apart with the trials and tribulations of life but they're still in our hearts.

Even though I find comfort here and with these people, I don't know if my heart is here anymore. I find myself craving something new, a new place to be, new people to meet, a different atmosphere. What the city use to provide no longer is enough for me and my family well, doesn't have the ability to give me what I need.

I have totally digressed from what I wanted this post to be about though. I didn't really mean for the moving to take a literal sense, I want to talk about it more in the form of emotional moving. The post below on Closure is kind of the jumping off point for this. You love someone, give yourself of them, and create space for two instead of one and then it ends. Well, what do you do now? You now have a whole bunch of empty space, extra baggage and trinkets scattered around, and no longer can identify who you are because you've identified yourself with them for so long. You can box it all up, put it on a high shelf and mark it as "Do Not Open" and fill the emptiness with self-doubt and self-loathing, you can burn the stuff and fill the emptiness with a blur of activity, or you can sort through the baggage throw away the bad, return the good, and fill the emptiness with the pursuit of finding out who you are and what makes you happy. I've done all three. They all work but some are more temporary than others. That's why it takes you six years to write a post on closure.

Let’s just face facts though. I'm no good at the relationship thing. I either don't give a fuck and adopt an uncaring attitude or I get obsessed, give too much, and smother the person to death. I'm not good at finding the common ground. It's kind of a power struggle, either I control it all or I give it all away. It's the only part of my life that I rarely walk the tightrope, I just jump off one side or the other. It's hard, I don't know what love looks like. I don't know what a good relationship is. Hell, I don't even know what a healthy relationship is. My mother's mother had six kids, my father's mother had nine kids, of those 15 kids, 10 have been divorced, 3 more than once, and 1 has never been married. I've got bad odds, two to one. My mother had 3 kids; it's not looking too good.

Maybe I’ll just never get married. It seems like it's too big of a risk to take. I've seen good divorces and I've seen bad divorces and it's enough to make me not want to have one. I want to find someone who's perfect for me, who complements even the worst aspects of me. I want to find someone that understands me, that can tell what I'm thinking from the raise of one eyebrow. I want to find someone that challenges me, that make me a better person and forces me to work harder. I want to find someone that thinks for himself, but who also knows how to listen to what I have to say. I want the one person I can't have, the one person who will never be mine, the one person who has never hurt me; I want the first person who taught me what love is.