It's Only A Paper Rose

One of the houses I lived in growing up is for sale.

It's not the one I associate most strongly with my child/teenagerhood - that one, amusingly enough, was across the street from this one (2361), and had a slightly nicer floor plan (though still roughly the same shape).  Prior to buying 2361, we rented 2360 for a year or two...I must've been nine, tennish.  A few years before my parents' marriage really started dissolving.

It looks rather different now, of course.  You'd expect as much - carpet and appliances and fixtures wear out or go out of date.  I particularly like the track lighting in the kitchen, even though the wood flooring doesn't do much for me (I like wood floors in general, but the multi-color seems a bit busy).  I miss the cathedral ceiling in the living room (both houses had it), even though it made changing the lights a royal pain.  Oddly enough, I can't for the life of me remember if the glass privacy panes separating the living room from the study/third bedroom were there when we lived there; I seem to remember it being open to the living room, but that might have been 2361. 

Amusingly enough, the picture I had the strongest reaction to was one of the most boring:  this one, of the downstairs family room.  See, that used to be my bedroom, and I broke my arm there - the floor was fairly hard (carpet over cement, no padding) and I somehow got it in my head that jumping off my daybed to do a cartwheel would be the best thing ever.  As I recall, I got in a good two or three before I landed wrong and the bone went snap.  (I was so embarrassed that I told my parents I'd just fallen off the bed, which seems funny in retrospect considering I was in gymnastics at the time and had fairly impressive balance.)  Missed a trip to Denali National Park with my grandfather, too - we were literally minutes away from leaving at the time.  I don't think I ever did go, even though I'm told it's gorgeous.

Another memory - before they built the townhouses you can see in the distance here, that whole area was nothing but thick woods up to the highway.  It wasn't really that thick - you could hear the highway, even if you couldn't see it - but the visual was all that mattered for it to be a veritable forest to a kid.  'Course, the moose that we occasionally encountered back there helped too.  My brother's bedroom was next to mine on the bottom floor (the windows were at ground level), and on his birthday one year a moose lumbered by and looked right in his window.  He thought it was the best present ever.

Looking out the window now, with sixty-degree temperatures and the sun rising at promptly 8 AM every day in January, I'm not sure if I miss Anchorage or not.  I certainly don't miss being a kid - I hated the helpless feeling of being dependent on anyone, and I don't miss listening to my parents fight, either.  But there were good things, too - snowball fights, sledding, playparks, biking all over the neighborhood - and the fact is that I spent more of my life there than anywhere else I've been so far.  But now my mother's in Florida, and my father and I aren't exactly on speaking terms...I might go back to visit my grandmother, but I can't see as I'll ever live there again.  Even if I did, it's far from the same place I grew up in.  Makes me wonder where next I'll find that feels like home...

I was playing with the iTunes Signature Maker just now, and it brought up a clip from White Houses, probably because it was on my favorites list for a while some months ago.

I don't really remember it from when it first came out; I don't think I was listening to the radio much at that point, anyway. It struck me mostly in retrospect, when I put Harmonium in my listening rotation a year or so ago. I looked up the lyrics (about the singer's first experiences with the world in general), and in that rare way that happens with music on occasion, it all clicked - the bittersweet chord progression, the almost childlike piano hook, and the dizzying suddenly-overwhelming instrumentation. It's a song that encapsulates, nearly perfectly (for me), the intoxicating rush of being on your own for the first time.

I don't know how well I can explain the feeling, especially since it seems to be one of those marvelously subjective things - depending on one's experiences, it may be stronger or weaker or never really happen at all. But I can't be the only one who's felt that delirious joy of having left the relative safety of home and plunged headfirst into this strange new world of heady freedom, where all sorts of new experiences await and all kinds of pitfalls make themselves known in short succession, but it's all okay because you're not waiting to live your life anymore, you're not wondering what your life will be like anymore, you're out there living it for yourself - who cares if you just got caught in a downpour in a white shirt and no bra, what does it matter if you just overdrew your checking account by $100, why bother worrying about the messy relationship tangles you're creating? You're creating them - you have the power to create your own life as you see fit, and when you inevitably fuck it up, it's still amazing because you created the fuckups, and you can get yourself out of them as well.

It's giddy, and overwhelming, and dizzying, and mad, and sweet and nostalgic all at once because you know that it can't last, and really you don't want it to. But while it's happening, it's an amazing ride, and when it's all over and you're (slightly) older and wiser, when you have a better idea of who this "you" person is...you know that it's a time you'll always look back on with fondness, for your massive failures even more than your successes. In retrospect, I wonder if that process of self-identification isn't the time in our lives when we're most free - without (most) parental restrictions, without many solid notions of who we are, without much in the way of better sense to guide us, and if we're lucky, with a family with enough forbearance to help cushion the worst of the blows when we inevitably get ourselves into trouble, and enough love to refuse to fix our problems for us entirely.

Does anyone else have the slightest clue what I'm talking about? And if so, is there a song that encapsulates your experience?