It hasn’t been my home for about 4 years now. It’s been my pit-stop, my in-between living place, my limbo, and more than anything, my parent’s house. So maybe that’s why I’m feeling relatively fine with the recent for sale sign that’s gone up on our front yard. I don’t live here – and I haven’t, for some time now, so perhaps I have been saying my goodbye’s to the place I grew up in for a little while now, and the final one isn’t as hard anymore.

Regardless, 4 years ago this was my home – my only home – the one I was raised in since the day I was born until the day I decided to move out, and it holds every memory from some of the most complex periods of my life, and has kept all my secrets. So yeah, maybe it is a bit weird to be leaving it for good.

My high school heartbreak is stained into the carpet floors, and the secrets my friends and I told cling like ghosts to the bedroom walls. This house holds every phase of teenage angst, and remembers every single one of my parent’s rules that I would repeatedly break. It is so familiar, that I cannot tell you what it smells like.

This house holds so many memories that sometimes I still lie down on the living room couch and have to open my eyes so I don’t picture the moment my mom fell of its edge. There are parts of my childhoods that linger in the chipped paint of the kitchen pantry that I still have to come to terms with, but the tire marks from riding mini-bikes through the dining room have been painted over. My room is not really my room anymore, and in fact, I rarely sleep there.

It is strange that there are so many people in my life who will never step through these front doors, as though perhaps they are missing a little piece of me that others were able to have. This is the place I learned to love, the place I struggled with hate, the place that saw me in the midst of heartbreak, and the place that saw me come home months later and showed me what I had become.

I don’t live here anymore – I haven’t for a long time now. But for so long it’s always been the place I could come running back to if I ever needed to, and very soon now, it will be gone. I will go back to B.C. Sunday night, and I will be leaving the house I grew up in since day 1 in the rearview mirror as we head to the airport, and I must admit, it feels a little weird.