On the night before we were going to load the UHaul last week, I was home alone and a moth appeared. Nine years in this place and I do not remember a moth ever showing up here before. I love moths—these “night butterflies”—I have one included on the giant, solitary tattoo on my hip as a very specific reminder of how some forms of transformation must take flight in darkness. And this moth managed to arrive in real time, here, at the threshold of another transformation, with little in the way of clarity or direction, only an emerging trust in this inner voice that says it is time to go, to take that leap of faith.

I turned the light off inside to see if the moth might be helped outdoors by the light on the back porch. When I did this, the doorway from my kitchen to the backyard was illuminated in a way that made me feel like I was the one moving towards the light instead. Like an invitation to another world, a portal of some kind on the doorstep of this place I have loved for nearly a decade.

I have not lived anywhere longer in my life since my childhood home. And I arrived here not long after my divorce, materially starting over with very little in the way of furniture or things. Early on, I brought a date home and when he walked through the door his first question was to ask if I had been robbed. I re-built a life for myself here with the help of friends who brought me their extra dishes and even a futon. For a time when I first moved in I thought I had a ghost (a long story involving sewage) and even got help from a friend to prayerfully help lay this spirit—and the sewage problem—to rest.

Having arrived with so little, it was a joy to make this space utterly my own—from the art I found to the dirty white kitchen cabinets I painted tangerine orange during a crushing winter of heartbreak. And I fell in love with Oakland, too, and as a newcomer began to learn to connect with this beautiful and complicated place, often with my best friend and East Bay local, Nina G, showing me a new trail or neighborhood hangout. I had found this apartment thanks to her; she lived next door and we got to be the kind of neighbors in sitcoms where we knew everyone in our building and felt safe to give each other keys and even take a road trip to Ireland together.

But these last nine years in this apartment also came with a lot of grief and yearning: short and long experiments in love, hard days at work at a hospice I cherished but which began to push me towards burnout, a grueling season of depression and anxiety after my Dad died, and blurry, lonely memories of sheltering in place during the pandemic. Still, I also found company within myself by learning to make really amazing doughnuts and playing my guitar and taking voice lessons, doing the latter two somewhat loudly and badly by comparison to the doughnuts, but with grace all around from my neighbors who never asked me to “keep it down.”

This apartment allowed me the full independence of being a single woman and it represented a kind of security in my life that I have been exceedingly careful to surrender or share. Yes, it is damp and does not get good light and smells funky with mildew but the rent control was amazing and I got to live next door to friends. This was our retirement plan! But when I met Michael a couple of years ago, he expressed a confidence in love and partnership that I seemed to have forgotten. And his sweetness and playfulness and attention to the daily practices of beauty and rest gently and safely encouraged my work-weary, love-worn heart to try again. It has taken me some time, some messy, messy time, and though nothing is certain I am ready to take the leap into the unknown again as we consolidate our homes into one, to take a risk towards Love, even if it feels sometimes like freefall or like a moth edging towards the light.

So on my last night before I step across that dimly lit threshold, I wanted to simply say good-bye to an old friend.