A yoga instructor recently encouraged our class to practice our most difficult poses with the understanding that all things come to an end. It's a bittersweet truth, and one easily lost under 108 inches of snow.
But she's right. All things -- even this terrible, now officially historic winter -- do come to an end.
And so did we.
After weeks of snow emergencies and parking bans and walking eight miles a day to and from work (thanks, MBTA), I needed to take my mind off things, and downward facing dog wasn't working, so I left the apartment taking with me only a Zipcar reservation: unsure where it would lead me.
I drove by the old house. I had hoped they would have knocked it down by now. I would have felt relieved knowing the place we shared no longer existed. I would have one less thing that reminds me of you.
But the house still stands and it is more beautiful than I remember. Was it always yellow?
I saw the window of the second floor bathroom, which we left open by the way. We left in such a rush the last time we were there, and I don't think either of us really considered that we wouldn't be coming back. We sang and danced and fought for sink space in that bathroom. We weighed the cats and saved Turtle the Turtle. We tag-teamed a long night of food poisoning and battled regular anxiety attacks and promised each other we'd be ok. People can't see the life of that bathroom from the outside though. Just a weathered window into a dark room of an abandoned house.
The driveway is easy to miss under all that snow. We fought and slammed car doors and dreamed and drank in that driveway. We raced each other to the door and lingered under the stars for one more kiss. We forgot keys and wallets and hats. We debated moving in together and away together. We planned our next adventures and packed and moved from that driveway. Now you'd hardly know it was there.
I saw the backyard we talked about filling with our kids. I saw the trees you said you'd miss the most. I saw the blackberry bushes you ate from in the summer, and the Genesee Beer sign hanging in the front porch, a relic of house parties past. Your mailbox is missing. Did you take that with you? Seems like an odd thing for someone to steal.
Your new house is great, but we don't live there. You do. We will always live in that dumpy house next to your best friends and close to your parents. The house you sold one day on a whim. The house we left in a loaded truck last September. The house they'll knock down soon.
The sun shines a little longer these days, and the snow continues to melt, and soon this winter will exist only in exaggerated anecdotes swapped at summer BBQs. We may even reach a point when we will hardly believe it happened at all.