20 April 2022

I am flipping out.

The economy, the housing market, the practicalities, the investment income ... numbers and realities. It all makes sense in every way that counts. We should sell this house.

Not just rent it. We are going to sell this house. I am shattered. And, yet, it is entirely my decision.

When I was in college, I dated this boy for a while. His name was Vladimir and his family had emigrated from the Soviet Union -- when there was still a Soviet Union -- when he was a teenager. Jews could sometimes leave then if they said they were going to Israel and his family had said that. But in Rome they changed planes -- not for Israel, but for the US.

And so Vladimir, sad-eyed and lonely, spent his teenage years in Brooklyn, lost and brilliant and beautiful.

He was admitted to Harvard early and I met him there by accident -- two hurt people who shared our lostness for a while and then didn't. When I think of him now, it is always winter -- always January -- and the rooms are always empty and the light is always pale blue.

And he told me one day that all he wanted -- all he wanted -- was to be in a room -- just for one day -- and to know that Leningrad was outside its walls. To feel that he was in the place that was home. What wouldn't he give, he said, for one day of that aching, fleeting feeling -- "home"?

When Tris was a new baby, we slept -- the three of us, Aiden, Tris and me -- in one bed in this house. My babies and me. The two babies have grown up and moved away, but the light is still there in the room that was once our room. It is the room where Aiden was sleeping when I took one last look at him before I headed out to the hospital to give birth to Tris. It is the room where we packed their things to send them off into the world on their own. It is the room still filled with the discarded relics of them that mean nothing to my fine young men and everything to me.

There is no way that I can hold onto the light in there, in that room. There is no way to stop time and live forever in a moment long gone when they -- my loved, my ached for -- were still my babies. That is gone now. And I will never see this light again when we are gone from here. And it breaks my heart.

But there is no way to capture that light. To capture it is to kill it. I was lucky to have had it at all.

What are you supposed to feel when the future is a shining adventure dream and the past is the marrow of your bones?