Departure

 Living in my parents' basement. The beginning of the end.

This was not the part where I was in high school and pretty much had the run of the lower floor. This was a gathering space for band geeks and friends of band geeks back then. We played Atari. We played ping pong. We played music. Loud. We played more Atari. When everyone went home, I went back to my room, covered ceiling to floor in posters, put on my headphones, and went to sleep. Listening to loud music. 

And somewhere in there I graduated. I prepared to launch into my collegiate experience with a ton of misgivings, most of which centered on a complete lack of preparation for separation. From my girlfriend. From my friends. From my family. Instead of making myself ready for what was to come, I spent days in the half-light downstairs, playing endless games of solitaire on the faux fur arm of the couch. Alone. 

In the meantime, my friends, family and girlfriend continued on with the expectation that I would be leaving the basement and going to college in Santa Fe. This did not happen because of the aforementioned lack of preparation. I was not ready to leave home. 

I still had all those games of solitaire to play. 

Meanwhile, life around me changed. I was encouraged to go out and get a job if I wasn't going to college. After a year of working at Arby's full-time and returning to the basement while everything around me changed, I felt that I could  perhaps make some sort of exit from the world I thought I knew. The next fall, I packed up my stuff and moved into a dorm in Colorado Springs. A little bit north of Santa Fe, but it was out of the basement. 

My parents were kind enough to keep my younger brother from following the trend in our family of letting the next kid move into the basement when the older one moved off to college. I maintained a spot in the basement for another year while we all figured out whether I could actually leave the dungeon behind permanently. The year following, I moved back to Boulder, but not back into the basement. The spell was broken. I moved into an apartment, but was allowed visitation privileges on the basement. 

Several years later, when I had graduated and was preparing to leave Boulder for a new life on the left side of the country, I moved back into that basement while I arranged my leap to California. My parents had carpeted the place. Bought new furniture. Moved my mother's sewing room into what used to be the cellar dweller's lair. I set up camp in a corner and waited for it to be time to leave.

I knew it this time.