Rookie is no longer publishing new content, but we hope you'll continue to enjoy the archives, or books, and the community you've helped to create. Thank you for seven very special years! ✴
Rookie is no longer publishing new content, but we hope you'll continue to enjoy the archives, or books, and the community you've helped to create. Thank you for seven very special years! ✴
25 Comments
This is so amazing and really needed at the moment. My parents almost sold my home earlier this year and I couldnt feel more sad about it…It was almost like my whole childhood was going to dissapear and that I wasnt going to be able to relive every moment of my life in that house ever again. It is so weird that we can get so attached to things
when my mum died we had to give up the house where I grew up. I feel every moment of this comic, Esme. Thank you so much for drawing this feeling.
xo,
M
Gorgeous.
Oh my.. this is really wonderful, Esme. The dream strip made me tear up. my parents just sold the house where I spent all of my teen years, and we moved out less than a month ago so I can really relate to this. I wrote a poem about it while it was for sale and this is one of the last sunsets I got to watch there . I also took pictures of some parts of my house, and my empty bedroom, before leaving the place for the last time. A couple days after we moved out, “Don’t Forget Where You Belong” by One Direction came on shuffle while I was listening to music and that REALLY fucked me up because the lyrics “don’t forget where you belong/home” coupled with the fact that Zayn had just left the band and I had just left my childhood behind was too much. e The sense of finality to it all was such an unexplainable experience for me, but your comic really nailed it.
At this point in my life I am going through a lot of changes, and moving houses was something I couldn’t prepare myself for. I cried a fair bit in secret; it wasn’t really a big deal to the rest of my family, but I felt like leaving that house was quite literally leaving behind my childhood, like Peligen said. It really is strange how attached we feel to big blocks of wood, bricks and cement but the thing is I don’t think we’re yearning for the building itself so much as we are for the memories we have of living there. Especially the places we had good experiences growing up in, places where we were more carefree. Like you said, “memories are attached to things”. I know that I’ll adapt, but I still feel like I’m staying at a hotel in this new house and I find myself aching to go back to my old house and go back to how things used to be when I was younger.
A couple years ago I visited the house where I spent a good portion of my early childhood, and it really did feel like I was in a ghost town. Everything there felt smaller, and it was so strange to see the various alterations the owners had made to it. It was how I remembered it in some ways, but in others it was completely foreign territory.
“maybe this feeling never goes away, and we’re all just fucked”… nothing could more accurately describe how I feel right now. ah well. It is what it is.
a very relatable comic. i really appreciated every page. thank you Esme
I have a similar, but different problem. It’s kinda like the inverse of yours.
You see, I’ve moved around a bunch since I was a kid, but I’ve lived in this house twice now. Some really sad things have happened while i’ve lived here, and this house seems to just keep mocking me, reminding me of them. Do you know when you read novels and you visualise the stuff that’s happening in the story inside your head? Whenever I do that, my mind’s eye always seems to drift back here… and the only escape from it is in my dreams. I feel like I’m living in a memory, or something. This house is weird.
Woah i needed to get that off my chest. Your comic is great, by the way. I really enjoyed it. :)
Oh, now I’m thinking of Philly! I live in the American South (Georgia) but I remember tons and tons of things about the North… oh, I’d really love to go back one last time.
It feels really good crying over memories; it helps get some of my sad feelings out.
Ohhhh I can so relate. My grandparents just moved off their farm and into the most boring not-even-a-suburb ever, and I’ve been having such a hard time moving on. Just like all the things you talked about, I have so many memories in that house… my parents got married there, I worked with my grandpa in his shop there, I spent countless hours with my cousins and grandparents there. I knew they were old and it was coming, but my grandparents only told us a month beforehand that they were moving, and so while a lot of the rest of the family traveled to help them pack up and move, I had to stay home because I was busy with school and college applications. So for closure, instead I ended up writing my college essay about my grandparents’ farm… which turned out to be a perfect way for me to capture its importance in my life. Thanks for your post, it reminded me of a lot of beautiful things about my grandparents’ home.
When i was little,we changed houses every year.when we finally found a house and stuck with it (for 5 years i may add) i was ecstatic. I could make friends and you know, KEEP THEM.when we moved again in my 7th grade year, i was upset,and then we started the moving thing again. But even if we stay in this current house until i graduate,it still won’t be as long as my elementary school house,and thats just kinda sad. Then again,i cant fathom raising kids in one house their whole lives.it sounds scary and permenant.
wow, this was so beautiful and exactly what I needed to read at the moment. We recently had to move out of my house that I’d grown up in and the only house I had any memories in. It was really devastating and I’m still upset about it. reading this comic and being able to relate to so much of it was so helpful. thank you.
It’s so weird to read this today, right after I was talking to my mom about how it felt to move a couple years ago. Seeing the house I’d spent my whole life in up to that point be emptied out was just freaky.
Also… JOANNAAAAAA !
True story though, I have banned myself from listening to some specific songs of hers when I am in a fragile emotional state haha.
I LOVE Esme’s drawing and this is just so perfect.
I too experienced something similar. It was my grandma’s family’s property and no one lived in that house for decades, but my parents, my brother and I used to spend there few days when we went visiting for Christmas all the aunts and uncles in my grandma’s hometown. When my parent’s divorced the tradition changed and it’s probably 10 years since I went into the house for the last time. Sometimes I still thinking about it, picturing it in my mind. Now it is for sale and I will never be there again.
This is an amazing piece that has touched so many”universal truths” about memories, concept of home, passage of time and the ever changing flow of life. It covers sorrow but also love and the amusing hopefulness of present reality. Thank you!
This is so relevant to me right now. I recently lost my grandmother, and so her house is being sold. I can’t help but feel exactly the way that you do over a house – I spent so much of my childhood there, memories of an little kitchen brimming with the extended family to celebrate a cousins birthday, kids sliding down the banister, coffee stains on the 40 yro table… It all seems so connected to that house and now that its all going to go these will become just memories, nothing physical to tie them to.
You´re amazing! Really cool blog!
bluevacuous.wordpress.com
oh wow, this really hit me hard! my dad lost his job about two years ago and we had to move to a much much smaller studio. the first night away from our old house i cried and cried! and now sometimes i have dreams that we still live there or something, and then i remember that we’re not…
Most of my dreams take place in the house I grew up in, or my grandparents’ old house, which I also pretty much grew up in. It’s been a decade or more since my family has lived in either of those houses, but I can still remember every inch them. It’s nice to still see them in my dreams.
I was 16 when I realized that our house isn’t really /our/ (my nuclear family’s) house . It was still named after my grandma, no biggie. But last year, my uncle drunkenly demanded for the house. It then dawned on me that we could be easily evicted from the house anytime as long as those papers aren’t named after my parents. My mother did offer to buy the house from my grandma a long time ago, but my grandma just didn’t want to.
While I haven’t lived in our house for five years after high school, the mere thought of losing the house haunts me.
I just want to point out that I literally left my grandparents house for the last time before it gets sold TWO DAYS AGO!
I love this so much
I always think you posts are so beautiful and insightful Esme and this one is no exception.
Question: Why do some of the writers on Rookie have no posts listed under their names?
It happens because of an annoying bug in our site design! We’re working behind the scenes to fix it soon.
This captures a lot of the feelings I had when my grandma moved out of the house she raised her children in to a more manageable flat. My mother and her 8 brothers and sisters were all raised in this tiny three bed house (all the boys in one room, all the girls in another). It was so specific and so special. I was so relieved when my cousin bought the house and moved in – but she changed everything in there which felt so strange – sometimes I think it would have been less confusing to just say goodbye to the house all at once! It sounds crazy talking about these feelings out loud – it’s just a house – but so many people attach themselves to places and my fondest memories of my grandparents are from that house.
Also – if I’ve guessed right I think I walk past this building all the time to eat at PJs with my boyfriend and his mum!
This is at such a perfect time! Literally right now I’m moving out of my family home forever!
Thank you! X