In four days I’ll move out of my home here in Rochester, Minnesota. It’s a little hard to over-express the grief I feel about leaving my house. Since I left home for college at age 18, I have moved 18 times. You read that right. I moved 18 times in 20 years. I have lived in my current house for four years. In my world, four years feels like eternity. I’ve moved a lot because I love change. I’ve also moved in the enormous wake of loss: my first great love who died, and my second great love who left. I’ve moved out of boredom, I’ve moved out of longing. I’ve moved for school, for jobs, and to escape a crappy neighborhood. But never have I mourned a house as I do this one. On the outside, my house is nothing special. It’s a 50-year-old rancher in a quiet suburb. It has tan aluminum siding and green shutters. The hardwood floors inside are in need of refinishing, and there are no granite countertops or stainless steel appliances or fancy lighting. But this house gradually became my home over the years, as I learned to live through harsh winters, observing the flying snow through the big bay window. Here I celebrated the long-awaited coming of spring, breathing deeply the intoxicating scent of the enormous lilac bush in my back yard. I threw parties here, lots of them, and many people danced salsa for the first time in my living room. I painted everything: the kitchen the warm colors of Guatemala, my bedroom with one big red wall, which I’d wanted to do forever but couldn’t pull off in a rental. I remodeled my upstairs bathroom nearly by myself, a project that almost pushed me over the edge. And I pulled myself together again zoning out to “The Bachelor” in my knotty-pine basement. In my office, the room where I sit now, I became a writer. Five published articles, a textbook, and this blog all began here, in this room with walls the color of a sunset. Three of my pets spent the last hours of their lives in this house (I have to admit the two remaining critters seem pretty stoked to leave). I’ve laughed and cried and played and worked and rested in this house. Over time, quite surprisingly, it because an extension of my very self, and it feels like abandonment of the worst kind to walk away and let someone else live here. This, my friends, is the enormous and bittersweet paradox of being alive. Everything that begins also has an ending. Every great story of falling in love, no matter how perfect, ends in death or separation. Every hello contains goodbye. Every new start eventually loses its luster, and we meet ourselves again in the middle of it all. This house, my home has become an outward expression of everything I love most in the world. I find comfort in the fact that if an outward expression exists, then an inner one must live inside of me. This house has been my safe haven, my sanctuary. Now it’s time to shift my attention again to the inside, where my sanctuary has always lived. If we are to survive change, we must remember that we are the center of gravity in our own lives, the haven lies within us, and we are ultimately safe no matter what comes our way to rock our foundations. So now it is time to draw back into me all that has bloomed within these four walls. The writer will come with me, as will the dancer. The memories of the loved ones who have laughed and lived and died here will come with me too. The setting sun that looks so lovely through my kitchen window will follow me to North Carolina. And there I can plant daffodils and tulips so my lilac in Rochester won’t feel so all alone. It’s time to say goodbye. And with that goodbye, a hello, to all unknown, mysterious, and yet to be revealed.