i suppose that even if my parents had stayed together, they more than likely would have moved to another house and eventually given some stranger the keys to the place where i became me. this felt different. it wasn’t so much that the title of the house was no longer in my family’s name; it was that the family that once lived within its walls no longer existed. my parents were no longer a community of shared memory in which the life and history of that house would live on, even if we would never enter its walls again. with my mom’s move the family house i had known for twenty years seemed to disappear into the infinitely deep crack that now separated my parents. it felt like the house had not simply transferred ownership but had been negated; it had been eliminated from the universe, and my place in the world went with it.
