Graceful Changes

Allison Zai

I signed a year long lease in Minneapolis. I move in on the 15th of April. There is no sense of doom that normally accompanies commitment, but I am nervously awaiting it’s arrival.

Some of me is anxious, some of me is excited. I have a lot of furniture I have to acquire in order to make the house feel like a home. As I buy what I want, I am aware that accumulating physical items makes it harder for future me to up and leave. To pack my clothes in a tote bin and drive away. In some way, they are pinning me down. But, I am also exercising my autonomy in choosing what to buy. I have never felt like I had control over any of the spaces I called home. To now be able to have complete agency over where I will be sleeping is a dream come true for my twenty five year old, twelve year old and seven year old self - all those versions of me that never saw her safety reflected in the spaces she was in.

This moving process feels easy, seamless so far. My muscle memory is to anticipate the dropping of the other shoe. What is going to catch me off guard? When will the despair creep in? What am I not seeing?

I want to sit in the peace of this choice of committing to a place, a home, myself for a year. I want to believe that change can feel graceful and simple.

I will light beeswax candles each night, walk barefoot on a thick rug and drink mugs of hot tea. These thoughts fill me with warmth.