Random Acts of Awesome

I am trying to figure out what I mean when I say things like "This house is haunted as fuuuuuuuuck.". Which I have been doing every night, at this beautiful house with giant windows overlooking a gentle canyon. It doesn't feel like your typical haunted house. Whatever your typical haunted house feels like. Instead, it feels like the house I grew up in. It feels like there is a cocktail party going on one dimension over, and the socially awkward one of the bunch is sitting on the porch that happens to face your kitchen window, and they are watching you with a detached, happy sort of interest. It feels like the masks that cover these walls have spent so much time together that they've formed a Stitch and Bitch club, and you're the newcomer who brought banana bread that everybody else makes better. They're probably not whispering about you, but they are definitely whispering. Some houses are just haunted. Maybe not by ghosts, not by sad or angry remnants of hum

Coming back to New England. The past is a potent, dangerous thing. I can't stop thinking that, can't stop those words running around in my mind. As I drive my car down streets that hold memories of me from 25 years ago, as I laugh with my family in the kind of joyous abandon I'm capable of with very few others, as I soak in the kind of Fall beauty that made my heart stutter and my eyes water when I was 10... There is so much that is appealing about this past. So much beauty that was left behind, and is just waiting to be discovered again. And so much that is no longer me. I'm drawn to be a version of myself that I discarded as unhealthy long ago. Family and home, makes me feel like I didn't actually throw away that version of me. I just hung her up like a coat I can shrug off and on as needed. My brain is screaming at me this trip. This trip of grieving my dead sister, of comforting my shattered, resilient family. Parts of me are reveling in nostalgia, are soak