The Pull to Keep Going by Holly Goodman
“We want the perfection only seen from the outside in”
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But tonight, out walking, I keep going. Past the fountain outside the complex’s front office, its lion heads spitting a constant steady stream into the bowl below. Same fountain I circled, toddler at my knees, hot August day of a different lifetime. Tonight is Daisy at my knees, nose to the ground.
All these homes holding windows holding lives, stacked side by side and one on top another. Layers and layers of stories I can’t know, knocking against each other. All these people, all with houses to put their lives in.
It's such a simple thing. Houses and houses and houses.
Still, in this moment it’s all so far from me, how they get them. But that's not the truth either. I've lived 22 places since the day I left my parents’ house for college 25 years ago. That's tracking only places I stayed more than a month or paid rent or held a job.
I know exactly how a person gets a place. I'm a fucking expert on rentals and house hunting and camping on beaches. Getting a place is not my issue.
It's how you keep a home that blows me to pieces.
When we reach the old apartment, all the lights are on, shades down so I can't see in, and I'm glad for that. In my head it still looks like mine inside. No time has passed. All the air, tight in my chest. Every breath I feel it. The big, old grandma oaks lined up along the sidewalk. This was my view. All the nights I smoked cigarettes out the bathroom window while my girls slept in the bedroom.
I want to know what I knew when we lived here.
I don't want to leave and I can't stay. I want to walk further into the night, but I have to turn home. It's getting colder and I have to pee and sometimes that's all life is. Meet our bodies’ simple needs and keep going.
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Holly Goodman has had work published in Literary Mama, Your Tango, The Frozen Moment: Contemporary Writers on the Choices That Change Our Lives, and Ohio State's literary magazine The Journal, where her short piece Fresh Water was named the 2007 Alumni Flash Fiction contest winner. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her daughters and her dog, Daisy.