I’m hurting. I don’t mean to. Tomorrow is the last day that the apartment we’ve moved from is ‘ours’. Although we haven’t actually lived there since before Thanksgiving, it hurts so much to let it go. I feel, too, a huge weight of guilt on my heart, feeling perhaps that I diminish my lovely new home, or the love of my partners in the home we share, or the loveliness all around me in this new place, by aching with longing to continue to hold on to this apartment. I’m not unhappy to move out, either. It isn’t actually ideal. It isn’t actually perfect, hell, as it turns out – it isn’t actually habitable in any healthy way (mold issues). So… moving, and moving on. I’m still hurting. I love the home we live in now. I love my partners and the life we’re building together. I’m excited about the future… and yet, I’m hurting. I don’t want to feel this hurt. Why it hurts isn’t even a mystery to me. This apartment has been my first experience with long term happiness and stability, my first experience with an everyday feeling of utter safety in my romantic relationships, and my first experience with living in a home that really ‘feels like me’…surrounded by my art, tastefully and carefully hung, and my lovely porcelain, and glass paperweights, listening to music I love every day, seeing the books I like on the shelves, and exquisite objects on display from far flung journeys…hours of happy conversation about dishes and curtains and furniture… leisurely mornings in the arms of Love… I have loved that home, and loved it with my whole heart, and allowed it to be my entire experience of ‘home’ for awhile. Yes, it is hurting me to let it go. Doesn’t it seem reasonable that it would?
There is a new home in my present, and in my future, too, perhaps. New choices to make about how it looks, and feels, and what goes where. A new life, new potential, new experiences all awaiting me as each step of each day takes me just a little farther down life’s path. I can do this, even do it happily, but damn – yes, I am grieving what felt so good there, in the insecure moments transitioning from one to the other. I don’t know how to feel differently; I’m happy to have had the wonders of life in that apartment, rich with love and laughter, in the arms of a Love indescribably precious to me, finally starting to really heal from some of life’s bigger hurts. Healing doesn’t stop because of an address change. Love doesn’t end because I’m in a new zip code. And hurting stops, eventually, in any place and time where there is healing and love. I know I can count on that. It will all be ok…but…
Tonight I will go to the apartment, finish the work remaining there and say good-bye to what is already gone. I will cry. Maybe a lot. Then I will go home to life and love and the future at home with my dearest Loves, and all the family and warmth and healing and love that I need to be ‘at home’, again.
Evening Light 
This is normal. Allow yourself this grief, sometimes places feel like people, sometimes places house our happiness, and it is a loss to let go of that vessel. Change, even change we love, that causes us excitement and joy, is still difficult; especially for introverts ;p Take this time to say goodbye, and then take time to revel in the joy of your new home.
❤
Thank you, Janise, and thanks for stopping by. I appreciate your wise kind words.
a) What Janise said.
b) Grief is often about not just the thing for which we grieve, but the loss of future plans — all our expectations and anticipations and hopes that were connected to that for which we grieve. I would have a much more difficult time imagining the good things to come in the new place than the good things I had learned to expect in the old place. Even so: Revel. How many different, joyful, perhaps even mutually exclusive things may come to pass in the new place? Wouldn’t it be cool if…? (Only I have to not get too married to such imaginings of my own, lest I drive myself into my own disappointment.)
c) I am glad you make many words and share them. They inspire my own.
Thank you, Jo. I treasure your insights on my words. 🙂