From Bryan White

So how did I get here? And what do I do now?

There’s a point when your kids are still little. They’re little, but they’re not babies anymore. They’re starting to need their space. You’re not just a young couple with a baby; you’ve officially reached that turning point where you’re a “family.” So you start thinking, “I guess it’s time to look into buying a house.” So you start looking at houses. You’re weighing the practical things — the price, the condition of the roof and the foundation, the schools — but in the back of your mind you look at each place trying to imagine what your life will be like there, trying to pick the dream that you’ll settle into for the next fifteen years, picturing yourself watching the same tree out the kitchen window grow and shed its leaves season after season. You peek in at the corner bedroom and picture yourself waking up there day after day. You listen for the sound the doors make when they shut, hearing the ghosts of voices travelling from the other rooms, knowing these sounds will stay with you like the passage of time itself. You don’t realize that this is what you’re actually doing, but later you know. You remember.

So you find a house. Great! You put down roots. You have good times and bad. Bills come in the mail that crush you under their weight. You lose jobs. You have awful fights with your spouse. You make up, but inside it’s tentative. You think, “How long can we keep doing this?” You stare ahead. You hold on. But things get better. You’ve got each other. You’ve got the kids. The house is warm when you come at night. Everyone’s asleep. You smile in the dark. There’s this thing called “your life”, and you do your best to keep it afloat. You take care of them. You keep the whole thing going.

The holidays and the birthdays and the Christmases go round and round and round, and you get older and fatter and sink more comfortably into your chair. And the kids get bigger and bigger. They work their way up through school, and they go on to college. Finally, they move out on their own, and it’s just you and her now. You look at each other and think, “Well now what?” It’s just the two of you. There’s rooms in the house you don’t even use anymore. It feels colder. It feels like the end of something.

One of you has a brilliant idea. It makes so much sense at the time. You don’t need all this house! You’ll fix it up and sell it. You’ll move someplace warm, and sit by the pool, and you’ll go out and have a good time. You’ll relax. You both deserve it. You’ve accomplished something, dammit! You raised a family. This is your time now. You’ll get a one bedroom apartment. You’ll live simpler, easier. You feel younger just thinking about it. You have this plan. You get excited. It’s all you talk about.

Well, fixing up the house ends up being a whole ordeal in and of itself. You stay patient. You reckon the dates. You nurture the dream ahead of you. Then you have to sell the house, and that comes with its own hassles. She loses her temper with the real estate agents. Deals fall through. Last minute repairs have to be done. You grit your teeth. You’ll get through this. Those last days finally arrive. You know you’re closing a major chapter of your life, and you wish you had the time to take it all in, to reflect on the place you’re leaving behind, but there’s just too much that has to be done, and you spend your last night in the house shredding up a bunch of old useless papers and sleeping on an air mattress because all the furniture is already gone.

That last morning comes and you’re frantically jamming whatever will fit into the back of the car, picking things that won’t fit that can be thrown out, things that you’d wanted to keep. You get into a petty argument over these things right there in the driveway, but there’s no time for that. The new owners are on their way. You hate leaving in a rush like this. You know it won’t sit well with you and it’ll stay with you for a long time to come. Fifteen years and you can hardly pause for a breath long enough to say goodbye. You drop some things off that you have to leave behind at your mother’s house, and she cries. She never cries. And that stays with you too, for a long, long time.

But you’re doing it! You get on the road. You head south. You’re an absolute emotional wreck. But you’re doing it. This is a moment that you’ve imagined and looked forward to for years, literally for years. And now it’s here. You wish you were a little better equipped to appreciate it. You’re not quite feeling what you thought you would. But that business with the house fried your last nerve. And the car is just so crammed with crap. And that’s it; that’s all the crap you have left. It’s terrifying. Why didn’t you ever think that that would be terrifying?

But you’re doing it. You drive through the night, through state after state. You get there. You start looking for a job, looking for a place to live. The rents are higher than you thought. There’s hidden this and extra that. You find a place. There’s suspicious people wandering around. People keep parking in your space. There’s been shootings and vandalism there. It doesn’t seem like a very nice place. You find another place. Things keep breaking at both places. No one seems to care about fixing them. You can’t even afford the new place. She starts to get fed up with the whole situation. You just wanted to relax. You want to go out, but you can’t hardly afford anything. You go out anyway. You’re trying to enjoy your life. That’s why you came here. The money starts dwindling.

You wake up one day and there’s a horrible charlie horse in your leg. You must have slept on it wrong. But you wake up the next day and it’s still there. And your leg is swelling and turning strange colors and going numb. You go to the hospital. They put you on medication. You can’t afford the medication. You can’t afford to be in the hospital. You can’t afford to miss work. You don’t have a choice. They tell you that you’ll have to be on this pill for a while. They don’t know why it happened or how to keep it from happening again, and when this is over, it won’t really be over, it’ll never be over. The threat of this coming back will hang over your head for the rest of your life.

You look at her, and she looks at you, and at the same time you both admit it. You have to admit it. It would be insane at this point not to admit it. Maybe this was a huge mistake. Maybe you should have just bought a smaller place back home. You both still call it “home.” You used to catch yourselves, like it was a slip. But now you just call it “home.” You shake your heads and let out a deep, long, sigh.

But then again, you’re here. You went through so much to be here. You had some setbacks. The blood clot thing would have happened regardless (although it’s hard not to feel like it’s a bad omen, coming as it does on the tails of your arrival.) You just need a stroke of luck. You need one good chance to turn things around. Sure it’s been disappointing, but maybe you just need to embrace the disappointment, move forward without expectations. It’s always darkest, and so on.

Ehhh, maybe. You’re not convinced. Some days you think it’ll work, and you even get a touch of that old excitement again. Other days you long, you ache, for home. You don’t know what to do?

So you write a blog post. It’s a private blog, so you’re not putting it completely out into the public. You whine a lot. You write the whole thing in the second person. It seemed like a good choice when you started, but now it’s just getting incredibly tedious. You bring the matter before a handful of readers, and ask, what to do?

What to do?