My eyes flash open. I wake up to the sound of my mom yelling that it’s time for breakfast, and reluctantly roll out of bed and check the time on my phone. 8:00. Weird, I thought. It’s Saturday. I can usually sleep in until 9:00 on weekends. Are we doing something today? I quickly got downstairs, still half-asleep, and was greeted by my parents, who were looking more excited than usual. “Why are we up so early?” I asked right away. The energy that they held within them flickered and faded, and my mom let out a small sigh, silently indicating that I should already know what was going on. I sat down at the table, feeling my cheeks get warm. However, it wasn’t long before the perkiness returned.

“Don’t you remember? Today’s the day we move! Movers are coming at around 9:30, and we have to make sure everything is prepared,” she said, gesturing to the space around her.

The drowsiness that once plagued me evaporated, and I sat up straighter, snapping to focus. I glanced around the room. Boxes. Bare walls. Empty cabinets. The fact that we were moving so soon had somehow slipped my mind. We had been packing for the past few weeks, so I shouldn’t have been surprised, but for some reason, seeing the current state of our household was like a punch in the gut. I slumped back down in my seat and continued to eat my breakfast.

“Oh yeah! Right,” I said in response, and though I did not realize it then, I must have responded with more annoyance than excitement, because my mom just glared at the wall behind me. The confused “why are you glaring?” look I gave her just caused her to sigh again. There was a few minutes of silence before she broke the silence again.

“Moving is going to be so much better for us. Our new house is so much bigger now, and we won’t have to worry about making or receiving too much noise because we aren’t in a townhome anymore,” she exclaimed, with an added head tilt and slight side-glare towards the wall between us and our neighbor. “And we made sure that it’s in a neighborhood that goes to your high school. You’ll still be with all your friends. You were so excited when we announced we got the house back in May...”

My leg fidgeted under the table as I realized I made a mistake, and I reassured her. “Oh no, I don’t, like, want to not move. I just… didn’t expect we’d have to be up this early today.”

She nodded, saying something about my terrible sleep schedule, and I shoveled the last bite of my breakfast in my mouth. I lunged out of my seat and raced up the stairs, despite the fact that my legs still felt shaky. I made a hard left into my room, and stopped in the doorway to take in its contents. All the collections, figurines, and miscellaneous clutter on the shelves of my desk were gone, swept away into boxes like everything else. The shelves themselves were covered in an inconsistent layer of gritty dust, looking almost spotless where the various trinkets aforementioned once sat. I opened a drawer, only to find most of the clothes from it gone, and I had a brief moment of panic before realizing that they, along with 90% of everything else, were in a box somewhere downstairs. The posters of my favorite bands were no longer hung up on the walls. They were rolled up into tubes some time ago, but if I looked close enough, it felt like I could still see their faint outline on my awfully plain white walls. I slowly walked to and sat on my bed, still looking at the space around me with wonder. To this day, I still don’t entirely know why I didn’t notice how empty everything was until that morning. However, after realizing how long I’ve been staring at what’s left of my childhood room, I suddenly jerked my head out of the clouds. I couldn’t become too sentimental. This was a good thing, right?  I thought. I’ve been complaining about my room and this house for years, I should be grateful that we’re moving into a better one. But for some reason, something’s making it hard to leave… I shook that last thought from my head and left the room, refraining from looking back at it, and distracted myself by packing up whatever things I still needed to. Then the movers got here.

I stood in the corner of our living room on my phone, completely ignoring the movers and the shifts in the space around me. I only looked up when my mom yelled that we were getting ready to go, and I stared with wide eyes when I saw how empty everything was. It seemed smaller without the furniture, but the amount of space there was was borderline intimidating. I walked through the rest of the house right before we left, sprinting up the stairs and stopping in my now bare bedroom last. I internally winced as nostalgia hit and I remembered everything that happened in this room and everything I tried to do to personalize it. The emptiness I saw is what first comes to mind whenever someone asks about our old house, and now I wish I had spent more time taking it in before my mental image of it was reduced to four white walls and a worn-down hardwood floor. You still own the same stuff that was in this room. It’s not like you’re giving everything away. I reassured myself. A quiet voice in the back of my mind was telling me that I should stop following through with this; that I still didn’t want to let go. Once again, I swept the thought away, closed the door of my room, and ran down those creaky, beat-up stairs for the last time.

The car ride felt excruciatingly long. Even though it was just 10 minutes, it felt like 20. I could barely look out the window; I’d see places that we’d always pass by on the way back home, places I knew I wouldn’t see as often anymore. I tried blasting music to clear my thoughts, but pretty soon I absentmindedly looked out the window again. I was greeted with scenery I’ve never seen before; a road lined with tall pines we’ve never drove down, but I knew we would end up driving through it a million more times in the future. I quickly turned away from the window, and turned my music up to drown out everything else. After what felt like a full-blown road trip, we finally arrived.

I opened the door, and was greeted again by emptiness. My mom and I went to the house a little earlier, while my dad stayed behind to help the movers. We had, I speculated, at least 20-30 minutes until they got here. I headed to the stairs while my mom went to check out the backyard (something she was particularly excited about, as we didn’t have one before). I didn’t know what I expected when I took the first step, but it certainly wasn’t what I was met with. Carpet, I thought, looking down at the stair step. Not scratchy wood. I went up a few more. No creaks either… I ran up the the rest of the stairs at the same speed I’d usually run up stairs, only to almost slam face-first into a wall. I blinked in momentary shock, staring straight at it before realizing the stairs leveled out into a platform before turning onto the second floor. There weren’t any turns on the stairs in our old h- I caught myself before I could finish the thought. Why was I paying attention to something as trivial as the stairs? Why was I complaining about the things that made them better? I rolled my eyes to myself and strolled over to the door of the room to my right. When I opened it, I was greeted with a spacious master bedroom that could probably fit two queen-sized beds. Too big. Definitely not the room I want. My eyes lingered on one of the walls, covered floor-to-almost-ceiling with large mirrors that also served as closet doors, making the space look less like a cozy bedroom and more like an eerie, abandoned dance studio. I mentally took note of this and closed the door, heading to the door across the hall. This room was much smaller, the walls painted the same shade of tan-ish beige (a color I despise) as most of the other rooms. This is probably where the office would be, I immediately thought, which made complete sense. In the same way the master bedroom looked like a boring, empty dance studio, this one looked like a boring, empty cubicle. I left that room and opened the last door that didn’t lead to the bathroom.

The first thing I noticed was the walls. A light blue-gray. Almost the exact color I’ve been wanting to paint my room since I was nine or ten. It was big, but not so big that I’d have more space than I wanted. I paced around the room, imagining the layout of everything, tracing the imaginary outlines of the furniture with my steps. Within moments, my mind’s rendition of my new room was better than I could ever dream it to be in my old house. It was basically perfect. But for some odd reason, I felt a fluttering in my stomach. I peered out the window, seeing that I had a perfect view of the backyard. My mom was out there, studying the empty plots of dirt, probably wondering what kinds of flowers she could plant there. I could tell that she already loved this place, and I wanted to, too. Something about it just felt… wrong.

I paced my to-be room in a different manner now, walking the perimeter, scrutinizing its every detail for longer than I’d expect myself to. The dark chestnut color of the floorboards annoy me. The gray on the walls is too dark. The flecks of paint on the ceiling make it look messy. It smells too much like new paint and plastic. The sun doesn’t shine directly through the window; it’s too dark in here considering the time of day. If I stand right here, I can feel a slight draft from somewhere. I then backed up until I was near the doorway and looked at the room as a whole. Empty. Just like everything else. Just like how it felt closing the door to my former house for the last time. I wanted to be excited about this. I was supposed to be excited about this. Everything was so much more improved now. There were so many things I had already seen within 15 minutes of being there that I could only wish for before. I felt selfish for wanting to go back to the place my parents (and even I) considered more of a house than a home recently. Plus, it wasn’t like I was losing anything; I’d have all my possessions, all my friends, all the things I still loved about our old place, without the added negatives.

All of a sudden, my mind then fought back against this thought, sweeping it away like dust, before it made me realize that I was losing something. My thoughts were flooded with this new revelation. I could no longer physically relive the memories of our old place. I couldn’t stand in this room and say something like “When I was six I sat in this very corner watching a trail of ants crawl across the floor and out the door because I didn’t want to kill them.” (which actually did happen). I couldn’t walk through the front door with a friend and tell them, “Remember when we built a fort behind the couch that one summer after 4th grade?” because while it was the same couch, nothing else was the same. It would take me weeks to remember where one specific thing is, because I’d still only remember where it used to be in our old place. I wouldn’t be able to walk around with my eyes closed and navigate the floors with ease and know where almost every single dent and crack was, and I probably never will. But the guilt still pounded down on me, and I was torn apart at the seams again. I sighed, leaned back against the wall, and slowly slid down until I hit the floor with a gentle thud. I popped my earbuds back in, listening and staring at the ceiling until I heard the front door open, accompanied with animated voices.

I didn’t repeat what I did when we were moving out. I instead watched the movers slowly fill up the vacant spots with familiarity. They eventually got to my room, and pretty soon it was arranged in that same perfect way I was dreaming up before, and within weeks I had decorated the walls and shelves with so many arbitrary items that it almost felt like I’d lived here my whole life. Almost. Because when I walk through the front door, oftentimes I can only see items from a place that I both missed and resented merely placed in the rooms of an empty house that I both did and didn’t call home.