Moving

The music pounds in my ears louder than I usually like it, but today I don’t care. I try to keep my mind on the music as I throw clothes in to the cardboard box, trying not to think of what the boxes mean. Sophomore year had just ended, and I should be ecstatic, hanging out with my friends at Jollyman Park or at someone’s house, enjoying the first few moments of summertime freedom. Instead, however, I was stuck inside, helping my parents pack for our big move.

Move. The word hadn’t meant much to me before. “Move out of the way” meant taking half a step to the side to let someone pass. “Move it here” meant clicking and dragging a portion of a photo project from one corner of an 11-inch screen to the other. I never realized the word could have this other meaning: “We’re moving.” Meaning leaving this house. And not just to a different neighborhood, or even to a different city in California. My family and I were going to leave the country altogether.

Granted, Canada is probably the least foreign a foreign country can get. But still, leaving Cupertino, my home for all 15 years of my life, to some random city in Alberta, Canada was pretty unnerving. My mother had informed me of the decision a month ago, mumbling something about “Dad” and “job” as an afterthought. At the time, I had been so preoccupied with studying for finals that it hadn’t completely hit me that we were actually going to move. So it wasn’t until after I came home from my last final this afternoon, and finally took notice of the multitude of brown cardboard boxes that lay around the house, that I suddenly realized the reality. We couldn’t be leaving. There must be a different reason for the boxes. The return plane tickets must be hiding somewhere underneath those passports. The goodbye party we were going to go to this evening was just a joke.

But it wasn’t a bad dream. We really are going to leave the next morning. And that is why I was in my room, blasting music while grudgingly picking and packing up my belongings.

After all the boxes are packed up and duck taped, I sit on the floor in the middle of my room and look around at the emptiness. With my bed gone, you can see the little dent in the wall that had been covered up by a multitude of plushies. The dent was the result of my head hitting the drywall when I was seven, an excited child eager to show my mom the great amusement found in running up and jumping up onto the tall bed. I smiled at the memory. After I had hit the wall, I had laughed as my mother freaked out, thinking I had suffered a concussion. Fortunately, the only real damage had been to the wall. My eye wandered to the tiny holes in the wall right above my desk. In my mind’s eye, I put the nails and the whiteboard that used to hang from them back on the wall. I could almost see all my reminders, in pen or on sticky notes, covering the once-white, but eventually green-tinted board.

I try to imagine a new room. Empty and white, no colorful posters on the walls to cover the blank canvas of wall paint. My mother, seeing the sorry state of the old whiteboard, had decided it was time to throw it away, promising me a new whiteboard when we got to the new house. A new white board, too, would be as white as the snow that would fall heavily during the winter.

Thoughts of snow cheered me up a little. Here, the only snow that ever came fell on the very tips of the mountains a little ways away. Our family went skiing every winter at Lake Tahoe, but it was a snowy respite that only lasted less than a week every year. My mother told me that there were two small ski resorts less than half an hour away from the new house; that would mean I could go skiing for perhaps four months rather than four days.

Thinking of winter makes me think of figure skating. I have been skating ever since second grade, so looking for a new club to join had been one of the priorities on the moving to-do list. The club my mom had found seemed pretty cool. They usually practiced in an ice rink in West Edmonton Mall, one of the biggest malls in North America. Apparently there are also at least three other ice rinks in that area. I wonder if there will be outdoor rinks too. The one time my friends and I went to skate at the outdoor rink in San Jose, the ice had been melting and was more of a pool than the ice rink by the time we were ready to leave. I figure colder weather would mean actually frozen ice rinks. Perhaps some day one of my friends from over here could come over and we could go skating outside.

Friends. Leaving everyone is the hardest part of moving. The school I am going to go to has a total population of about 400 students, less than the number of people in just my grade in my school here. Smaller classes seems like it could be a nice thing. Maybe then I’d be able to get to know everyone in my class by more than just their names. Of course, I will still keep in touch with all my friends in California with the help of email and facebook.

When my mother calls me to say we have to go, I turn off the music and run downstairs. It’s sad to leave all my friends, but I’m not so sad anymore. Perhaps Canada won’t be so bad after all.