As I write this, I am in a room surrounded by boxes. It is a position with which I am intimately familiar.

Cardboard boxes fill up the spaces in my walk-in closet, lining the walls of my bedroom, drifting into the hardwood floor of a living room that occupies about 300 of the 600 square feet of my overpriced one-bedroom apartment in a small college town, barely bigger than a studio but costing me almost $2,000 a month. This apartment is the first thing that I’ve ever had to call my own. The first place that has felt like a piece of myself. I decorated these walls with art. I lined the shelves with stuffed animals and books, ranging from the literary fiction and memoir that I display proudly in the living room to the smut novels lining the shelves in my bedroom. I put a crappy desk that I found out by a dumpster with a free sign in my bedroom, facing the window, and a small sign with a quote from Maya Angelou, where I’ve spent the better half of the last year writing essays and stories and grading papers and reading student stories. I decorated my room with Fleetwood Mac posters and tapestries and the Audrey Hepburn Vogue cover art that I’ve had since I was seventeen. 

In here, I have confronted my own loneliness, my love-hate relationship with solitude. I have hosted parties, and I have made dinner with friends, and I have laid on the couch reading with my cat atop the cushions above me purring. I have fallen asleep after one too many glasses of wine on the ratty gray couch, torn on the sides by my cat’s claws, a hand-me-down from a friend from my MFA program with whom I’ve not really stayed in contact. I have become a new version of myself, shedding the old one like a heavy coat. Or perhaps more accurately, I have become the same old me, but altered slightly. This place has been my becoming. 

And now I’m leaving it. 

How do I say goodbye to such a place? Even when I know that it’s time to go. Even when all of my friends have all fled from the dry central valley college town. Even when I have been bitching about living there for the past five years, dreaming of going anywhere else, ranging from the next city over to across the country. Even when being here felt like a noose wrapped tight around my neck, and I spent the first year of my MFA program wondering if I had made a mistake by not taking out the loans to go to Columbia, riding the subway and taking new lovers every week and being young in the city. Even when I complained of the town’s lack of diversity and the entitledness of the student body and how I felt old at twenty-five here. 

And yet, somehow, it has all grown on me. 

Whether I like it or not, this town has housed my formative years. I have lived in four different places here. Six months in a house with an older woman, who was my community college Business teachers mom, months filled first with depression and longing for my old community college and then wonder at learning what it meant to be on my own, until covid hit and took that away. Then six months back with my grandpa in Live Oak before I returned in late 2020, living in a townhouse with my roommate's mom---long story---becoming enmeshed with the Spanish family that became my roommates, feeling at home with them, and then subsequent fall out, most of which I can take the blame for, looking back. The twist in my gut when I still drive past that row of townhouses, even though I know that our old place, where I lived for three formative years from 22 until 25, is now empty. Then a year at an apartment with a nosy, passive aggressive roommate, dealing with the humidity of a third-floor bedroom with a shitty AC in the central valley, which felt like a blip in time except that I fell in love in that bedroom. And now this place. 

This place. 

Something all mine. 

Throughout my childhood, I moved every year or two, never spending more than two years at one school, and all that I wanted was something that was all mine. And now I have tasted it. How can I return home now? But I will return home to my grandfather’s house in Live Oak, land of orchards and banda music and peaches falling from trees. The mothy smell of the old rickety house situated across from a Muslim temple, a Sikh one at the end of our street. The place that feels most and least like home. I am in the in-between, unmoored and thrown out to sea, as I await an answer from an affordable housing community in West Sacramento, where I am praying to a God that I don’t believe in for an apartment in October. I am facing uncertainty. I am not good with uncertainty. I like a plan. I like control. My therapist says this is a trauma response, perhaps mixed with some OCD. I think that it is just good sense. 

I don’t do big feelings, and yet that is all I seem to have lately. Big feelings about moving. Big feelings about all of my friends leaving. Big feelings about returning home. I don’t do grief. It has torn me apart too many times, most recently when Pappy died in 2020, and I spent the next year doing everything to make my way to him, or to make sure that if I must remain on this earth without him, my time here would be as miserable as possible. 

But grief is what I feel now. A complex grief, tinged with feelings of uncertainty about my future and certainty that I must make this move. I cannot stay here. There are memories on every street corner. So many of my ghost selves haunt me. Me and my old roommate browsing in Logo’s Books, then buying coffee and reading side-by-side in Starbucks. Meeting a friend for coffee on my way home from school at Mishkas. Too many nights at Sophia’s in 2023, blurred by too many drinks and the thump of mediocre pop music, grinding against strangers, gossiping with friends. Times captured in photos, our hair frizzy with humidity, skin slick with sweaty sheen, and eyes bleary. The first man that properly broke my heart, and how I ran into him with my grandpa on my twenty-fifth birthday weekend when I had totaled my first car, awkwardly avoiding his eyes as he bagged our groceries at the Co-Op. The first man to part my legs and slide inside of me with a quick flash of pain, reminding myself to breathe as I listened to his ragged breath and the sound of one of my roommates showering in the next room over. Listening to my mother scream at me while I sat at the MU with my roommate and her sister during a manic episode, tears welling my eyes, body begging to give up. My first adult job at the Davis Adult School, which only lasted a year before I returned for my MFA. Meeting my best friend in the whole world, my lost sister, spending nights at her house drinking wine and sleeping on her couch. Laying by the pool with my friends, skin turning crispy then brown. Learning of my father’s death from my grandpa while I was visiting a boba shop with a friend, walking across train tracks that reminded me of his end, the sun burning my skin even in early November. Crying to that same best friend over the phone, who now lives in Irvine. Falling in love for the first time a few months later, with a man with big brown eyes and big warm hands, which he uses to stroke my hair and hold me, pulling me to him when he sees the wolves in my head before even I have. 

What do I make of these memories now? How do I fit all of these ghost girls in my bed? How would I continue on when it feels like everyone that I once knew has moved on, and I am left with these memories? 

Perhaps it is in my blood to run, moving from place to place as I did for my first eighteen years. Perhaps I’ve inherited my mother’s belief that a change of scenery will fix whatever is twisted and knotted inside my stomach now. But these memories, the ghost girls littering every street of this place, are the reasons that I know it is time to go. Even as the towel in my stomach bunches up at those words, the months of struggle and change that they’re sure to bring. 

But how do I say goodbye? What are the right words for letting go? I know there are no clean breaks, no easy moves. No one knows that better than someone who can’t count all of their moves on both hands, or even remember them all. But how do I let go of a place that has held so many contradictions for me for so many years? How do I move on when every bone in my body is telling me to just stay, lie down, become complacent? How do I unfurl all of my trauma, the complexities of my love-hate relationship to change, the only constant that I have ever known? How do I admit that these almost six years have somehow been the most stable of my life, where I could count on this small town to hold me and all of my contradictions? How do I let it all go? 

I suppose that it begins like this: I unfold a new box into a square. I lay the tape across it, and then pull until a strip comes off, then flip the box over and fill it up. I close the box. I do this until everything is packed neatly away. And then I leave.