That, What She Said... (Is What I had in Mind)

The idea of my life as a West Looper diminishing before me, comes gradually more and more into fruition as February approaches. Soon enough, with March, will come change... The dreaded north side of Chicago will be my new home. Really, the aversion (no - too strong a word - yet it was blurted out prior to this blog on a different occasion. We'll chalk it up to a lack of vocabulary to symbolize the "lesser feeling of 'aversion'") to Uptown is present. The geographical distance from all that has been familiar for the past 2 years terrifies me. It makes me unstable when, in ironic reality, this change should cause the opposite.
Stability. Commitment.
The metamorphosis from over-aged frat-living into that of partnership and raw domestication (is there such a word? Still, we'll chalk it up also) feels pretty much present now.

It has been difficult to assimilate myself ccupying a new bedroom that smells of fresh primer, or feeling a different strength of water pressure in my shower. It's all, attached still, I suppose.

In Sandra Cisneros' prose-by-the-way-of-novella, The House On Mango Street, she concludes her story brilliantly, and expresses everything I am feeling at the moment.
In the very last chapter of her book, Mango Says Goodbye Sometimes, Cisneros comes to this self-realization and mixture of relief and melancholy about leaving a place you once loved so much, yet the process of self-improvement also means that perhaps a clean slate, white walls, in this case, is in order... A battle, I suppose.
The House of Throop is perhaps the best apartment I have had to date, and I will miss it terribly.

I like to tell stories. I tell them inside my head. I tell them after the mailman says, Here's your mail. Here's your mail, he said. I make a story for my life. for each step my brown shoes takes. I say, "And so she trudged up the wooden stairs, her sad brown shoes taking her to the house she never liked." We didn't always live on Mango Street. Before that we lived on Loomis on the third floor, and before that we live on Keeler. Before Keeler, it was Paulina, but what i remember most is Mango Street, sad red house, the house I belong but do not belong to. I put it down on paper and then the ghost does not ache so much. I write it down and Mango says goodbye sometimes. She does not hold me with both arms. She sets me free. One day I will pack my bags of books and paper. One day I will say goodbye to Mango. I'm too strong for her to keep me here forever. One day I will go away. Freinds and neighbors will say, Whatever happend to that Esperanza? Where did she go with all those books and paper? Why did she march so far away? They will not know I have gone away to come back. For the ones I left behind. For the ones that cannot out. - Sandra Cisneros, The House On Mango Street