leaving home

I realized that in less than a year from now, I won't be living in Westport. I was thinking about it today when I was driving home. It is not a comforting thought. I'm looking forward to college, the freedom, the classes that I want to take, etc, but at the same time, I've never lived anywhere else except for my house, in my room.

I realized driving home today that in less than a year, I won't ever live in this house again, that I'll always be a visitor, then in a few years, when I come home, it won't be to the house that I've known all of my life. Sure I've been away from home for weeks at a time, but never with the intention of not coming back, never knowing that I won't be able to come home in a few days.

I realized that in twenty years or so, when I take my wife and kids back to my home, that they won't know this house, that they won't ever have lived here, even though I know it so well. At the same time, I won't know it anymore, and it's depressing to think that I'll slowly forget my first, and to this point, only, home. While I forget my home, so this house will forget me, becoming something different, the moment that I drive away from my house on my first day of college, this house will begin changing, and it won't ever be the way that I know it now.

I guess this made me realize that when my parents took my past their first house, that while it meant nothing to me, it meant everything to them. They have laughed, cried, loved and hurt in that house. To me, it's just another building. I wish that there was some way that they could have imparted that knowledge to me, let me see into the window of their first home. But that is impossible.

As I prepare for life in college and beyond, I'm realizing that this is the only "first house I've ever lived in." I won't have the same intimate relationship with any other place that I live for the rest of my life. It makes leaving for school that much harder.