Four Months

It has been a long four months.

It is funny how when you are with a thing too much - even if in the beginning you were so proud of it - you can really, really hate it. Everyone knows it is possible to get too much of a good thing, but home is where the heart is, right? In this case, I was in the thing that there was too much of - a house - Newberry. And in the end, I hated it.

It was the kind of hate that just made me want to lock it up with everything still in it and walk away. Let it fidget anxiously behind my back - She's not really just going to walk away, is she? Just leave it sitting. Make it wait, empty - Watch this, you old house. If the house hadn't been all around me, if it had been possible to glare at a fixed point to really make it feel my frustration, my impatience, my anger, I'd glare at that spot until the house withered in my gaze - or went up in flames. Then I'd give it the big middle finger. I despised it. I resented it. It robbed me of extra money I might use for a movie, toys for my kid, a bill payment, hell, savings. Ha! It was a lot of work. It knew all my secrets. It still knows all my secrets.

And yet...I'm back.

And it feels good.

Absence surly does make the heart grow fonder. Again, we are all familiar with such cliches. But maybe the house just needed to air out a bit. Lord knows a lot happened in it. It heard a lot about me from its spidery spies. Maybe it had just gotten heavy with thought, anticipation, misunderstanding, fear, promises and possibility...And a couple of stupid people doing stupid things. I know that in the last days, aside from my pregnancy, I could hardly move in the house. It was like walking in water. The ceiling was a wet washcloth, and I was a small scorpion underneath it. It was suffocating. I hated it, and I had to go.

I am at least 50 pounds lighter now, which helps, but the air is lighter around here, too. Maybe I just needed to clear the air. There is still a lot of thinking and anticipating and misunderstanding, fearing, promising and a ton of possibility. There are still stupid people doing and saying stupid things. We are always as dumb as we think we are - but I learned something in the last four, very long months: I didn't just miss this house...In the end, it's all just a big, fat analogy anyway.