Hard to articulate my thoughts on having to leave the house I'm living in right now. Something got messed up with the mortgage and it's in foreclosure. When I first moved out to sacramento, I had an apartment near my university but would drive all the way out to meet up with a group of fellow parkour practitioners. I felt immediately welcomed. It wasn't long before I was staying over at this house, eating homemade cookies and watching late night movies after a long day of training. I still had to go to school but I would come back to that house and the surrounding areas to train as often as possible. I had been borrowing someone else's car to get there but lost access to it and ended up having to ride my bike down there. Sometimes I would stay for an entire week just crashing on the couch in between exhaustive bouts of training and chocolate milk. I had a weird class schedule during the week, I think it was just tues and thursdays so I would be at school for as little as possible and head out along the american river bike trail as soon as I had the opportunity to get out. When I would arrive at the house, no one questioned whether or not I was meant to be there, I fit in perfectly with all my pk buddies and things just flowed as naturally as they possibly could. At some point my bike crapped out and/or I was so inspired by reading "ultra marathon man" that I would run the 15-20 miles from my apartment to that house, it would take me almost 4 hours. I would pick fruit on the way as I had learned the area so well from my friends. It felt right and necessary that I get myself there.
I immediately understood that this place was an important hub, the most important pit stop in my universe. It's Kame house from dragon ball z. It's a place you can go to where you won't be judged, ridiculed, made to conform to the conventional social norms and you're always training something. Your hands hurt while you were here, your arms ached. If you closed your eyes spun in a circle and opened them in any given direction you'd find someone punching something, or pulling up onto something, or doing a handstand, or eating a ridiculous amount of food, or wrestling, or smiling.
I would have to leave for a year to go back to my hometown, unsure of my university path but with the ideal of paradise in my head still. I became strong, not on my own, but with the understanding that I would come back there one day and I needed to be ready. I did come back incidentally, for a sad reason, ended up living there at some point while I went to school and things hadn't really changed, the spirit of training was still there. No matter what happened in life, I could just come back to this place and have a little more perspective. It felt like a secret place to me, like the people around me just had never had a true home like I had, they would never understand that depth of belonging, that feeling of "rightness" in terms of where you fit in the world.
I moved out again and got married and got divorced and came back and came out. Kame house was always there throughout all of it. I gravitated toward it always and secretly knew that I would have to come back here one day. It's been almost a year here and i've healed so much of my mind and heart since then. I can't imagine having done it anywhere else. I always knew it had to end at some point but my fondest memories in my short life so far come from this place. Really it feels like I've lived here all of the last 8 years. All the sweat, blood, and tears I've had here, the burnt skin and burning muscles, all have this place as a backdrop. I've got to let it go but I won't forget how it healed me and made me a better person. It's clearly the people here who have come and gone and stayed that have made it what it is in it's entirety. It's just easier to point to the place and get attached to it. I do hope that degree of openness continues wherever I go, that the feeling of home can be created again, I know it can.
