255. Song No. 3,799: “Ghosts in Empty Houses,” Jukebox the Ghost
Safe Travels, 2012

In this country, at any given time
There are two million empty houses
And one of them once was mine…

Ooooooh, this was a timely one and, thanks to the slow-moving nature of a cooling real estate market and even slower rate at which I process my feelings, it still kind if is.

An old coworker of mine currently lives in the house I babysat in, played endless rounds of NES games in, and watched change hands three or four times between 1990 and 2002, living on the same cul-de-sac where I spent all but three years of my Jersey youth and just a few lots away from my childhood house. Where my parents do still currently live, though apparently not for a whole lot longer. (Did I recently take a detour past my old neighborhood to see what their residency status is when I went to visit a friend who lives in the next development over? Oh, you’re goddamn right I did.)

By the time this song popped up in the rotation, it was almost three weeks after the above exchange and two days before my birthday, a day I kind of low-key dread for being when my father would sporadically make some bare-bones effort to reconnect with a one-line text four minutes to midnight or message to the work address I never gave to him. With this being the last year of my 30s—the span of years I claimed as my reclamation decade—all the past that I’ve been uncomfortably sitting with felt especially close, and summoning the resolve to take a virtual tour of the home where so much of it happened felt like an especially important personal victory (thanks, Zillow!). Confronting my childhood home, experiencing the alien-ness of something I once knew inside and out, and witnessing just how thoroughly any evidence of my brother’s and my presence has been erased and replaced with an army of tchotchkes was… a sense of closure I didn’t know I’ve been needing.

On the rare occasions I’ve spent any significant time with social media in the past few years, I’ve seen heartbroken tributes to a childhood recently going on the market, odes to the backdrop and backbone of a family, an outpouring of youthful memories that filled a structure with love and light and meaning and palpable memories that made it less of a setting and more of a cherished entity tantamount to a beloved matriarch.

I said goodbye to my own childhood home somewhere in the vicinity of a decade ago, the last time I visited my brother before he and his then-girlfriend moved out literally overnight as he severed his own ties with a past best forgotten and parents who never loved us with the all-consuming, unconditional affection and warmth a child shouldn’t have to feel they’ve only sometimes earned some wan facsimile of. I didn’t feel like I lost some benign, attentive elder with that house’s imminent changing of hands: I felt one more binding tie snap, gratefully unmooring me from a youth that feels more and more like a story I read and pushed out of mind rather than the actual endless nights spent crying myself to sleep because I felt so alone and unsafe, or countless days spent escaping into books and AOL forums and phone calls with the friends and boyfriends who offered the only proof that I was worthy of someone’s love after all.

The house I grew up in never really felt like mine. And it certainly never felt like my home. I never felt welcome there, more like a conditional guest who should be grateful for the bare minimum of a room over my head and a room with a door (with a hole my father punched into it because I had the audacity to defend myself once). The 12 years I spent there will, in another year, be matched by the time I’ve lived in my current home, the house my husband grew up in and has been in his family since his maternal ancestors stepped off the boat and built their first home on American soil with bathtub gin money almost 100 years ago. The story of this house is one that’s lasted for four generations; hubs has his own complicated past with this house we’ve made our marital home and Cthulhu knows it’s seen its own share of slammed doors and screaming matches, but we’ve reclaimed its peace with our little family’s quiet, happy life. And while I feel no real connection to my own childhood home, I want nothing more than for its own ghosts to be similarly quieted by its new owners breaking a three-decade pattern of no warmth existing within four walls that deserved better.