change

My parents are remodelling the house right now so they can sell it in the spring or summer, which means that before I go to college, I will be moving with them into the townhouse we own. They are selling the house so they can pay for my tuition. I really, really appreciate it, but the idea that things will change, that I will no longer be able to walk through the door of the house I have lived in since I was five, seems ridiculous to me. All of this painting and wood and tools laying around the house are threating the disillusionment inside of me. No. Things will not change. We won't move. I won't go to college across the country. I won't leave my friends behind.

It is as if my mind has decided enough is enough, and now refuses to believe any of the information I try to feed it. I can think, everything will change in a few months... your whole life will change to myself, but I don't really process it. I don't really understand it. It is a random crazy person's aphorism. It can't really be true.

They're even selling (but of course they won't really) my gorgeous piano... I love the piano almost as much as the house. It is the best piano I have ever played on. It shiny and white, a baby grand.

How can my mind cope with so many changes? Especially a mind like mine that is already predisposed to resist change. How can it be that after June or so I will never sleep in my beautiful yellow bedroom with the butterfly borders that I redid myself with my father's help ever again? How can that be real? How can I be in some city, so foreign it might as well be on Pluto, six months from now, sleeping in a room with someone else who is somewhere in the country right now, maybe sleeping or at a party? How can all of that be true, when the past thirteen years of my life have been so neatly contained in the city I live in? The sphere of my existence has really been so small... it extends only to this city really, and the parts of the state I have travelled to occasionally. How can that expand? How can it move? How can I go from a little city with an overestimate of 50,000 people to a huge city with subways and skyscrapers? How can I live there? How can I belong there?

But how can I stay here, when everything will change, when all of my friends will move away and go to their own foreign cities, and my house will be inhabited by strangers, and the perfection of all of the things that I loved will decay as the years march by?

Erin has been in Oregon the past few days for an audition to the university in Eugene. I have missed her incredibly, and she has only been gone since Thursday. How can I leave friends like her for months... perhaps a lifetime? (No, not a lifetime, these friends mean more to me than that, we will keep in touch)...

Patrick tells me that perhaps he will be going to Boston as well, to either Harvard or Boston College, and my desperate, shell-shocked mind latches onto that as an island of familiarity in a torrential river of change. I like Patrick a lot. He is a very good friend. If he is there, things might be okay. He can be a piece of my past, a constancy.

I look around at the disassembled house with a bit of shock and disbelief. I am excited by the idea of moving to the townhouse, not because I want to move (because I really, really don't), but because I believe it can't really happen, and the idea that it is only a few months away is ludicrous. I look forward to it as a challenge. I challenge the universe to really change. I challenge the second law of thermodynamics. Entropy, I dare you to increase! House, I dare you to be inhabited by strangers! Boston, Chicago, or Salt Lake, I dare you to become part of my limited sphere of existence!

I challenge with confidence. Nothing can live up to the challenge. Things won't really change. My thermodynamic arrow of time in my ideal world points backwards: broken tea cups pull themselves back together and place themselves on the table, decreasing entropy. My cosmological arrow of time in my ideal world points backwards: the universe collapses slowly in on itself. Only my psychological arrow of time remains normally oriented; it thrives on the past; it cannot fathom the future.

I'm terrified. I'm so scared. And when that fear becomes too much I laugh in the face of it all, because it can't be real, nothing can really change, it can't, it can't.