Getting ready to move

Elisa takes my hand and asks we will ever move back to Chaowaimen. Her voice is tender and masking a sadness. We’ve become attached over the past four years to the apartment and our every other week routines. She asks if we'll ever go back to UTown which has some of her favorite food and indoor playgrounds. I say yes.
I wake up the next morning, after signing the contract for our new apartment, feeling sad too. I tell Sabrina on the way to work that I am sad but that I’m not afraid to feel it. That it will pass.
We are moving maybe 10 minutes away to a slightly larger apartment with a better community and view. The larger apartment means Aidan gets his own room, which at 13, is better than sleeping on the living room couch which he’s done since I moved here.
I know why I feel sad, or why my conscious brain thinks so. I feel sad because four years ago when I moved into Chaowaimen the apartment and my life were in tatters. My first night was spend on the last tenant’s filthy futon with a smell of musky tea (the tenant was literally a tea vendor). I got up that next morning and started to clean the apartment getting on hands and knees until the stains in the cracks were gone.
It took much longer with many starts, fits, and stops for me. I may not be all the way there yet. Or as I’m want to say - I may not be out of the woods yet but I’ve stopped walking into trees. The moment things shifted was when I had the epiphany three years ago that I could keep the kids with me every other week for the full week with a slight change in their school commute. Since then on the weeks I have them we do everything together - everything being mostly meals. We built some of our own silly traditions like Friday night pizza party. But somehow it is about the rhythms. Waking them up at 6:50am, putting their lunch together, dinner time, shower time, sleep time.
I somehow got closer to the kids during this time than when we were an intact family. I’ve seen their struggles as they wanted a reconciliation between their parents and when they finally let go of that hope. I learned to survive on my own because.
For me, there were many dark nights on the weeks I did not have them. I did not always behave in admirable ways. I started relationships before I was ready, stopped them, and then started again. I found comfort in simple things done to excess.
Slowly, very slowly, I started to move forward and find a human context. I rebuilt up my life in this apartment. Both my single life and my single dad life. And now the single man and single dad parts are reconciling. I will miss this apartment as home.