August 15th, 2015 - Ashley Anderson

The partially unloaded U-Haul van sat in the small front parking lot next to my new apartment complex’s swimming pool. Today was move in day for my university’s new graduate student housing arrangement, an apartment complex at the end of an uphill dead-end street that used to be a warehouse for the gas street lamps this Cincinnati neighborhood was named after. My parents and I unloaded boxes and pieces of furniture while the youngest of my two younger sisters kept pushing things closer to the truck’s loading ramp. My other sister was currently in Rome, halfway around the world, finishing grad school.

The air was hot and muggy as hell outside, but despite the oppressive heat that knocked the wind out of me every time I stepped outside, today was a new beginning. This was the first day that marked doing something for myself. I was moving two hundred and fifty miles away from my rural Northeast Ohio hometown, one with trees and open fields of corn, cows, and soybeans, to a place I always wanted to live — the city. Almost any city. I wanted out, to experience new things, to know that there was a world outside of tractors and teachers remembering your parents when they were in high school and having to drive twenty minutes to find the closest grocery store. I also wanted to be a writer, and unpacking this U-Haul truck felt like the first major step in chasing after something that I had spent a lot of my twenties, most of my life, trying to decide if this was truly what I wanted and was meant to be instead of being something else…and a writer on the side.

It wasn’t long before the truck was completely unloaded. “Wow, you’re pretty good at that!” my dad said to my sister who, like me, had lived in the same house for the first eighteen years of her life. In the fall, she would still be sticking close to home, choosing to commute to a branch campus of the local state university instead of moving into a residence hall for her freshman year of college. 

“I mean, it’s not hard,” she said. If anything, the Anderson sisters were determined and stubborn at best.

The first thing we unboxed was my couch. Once we had the back clipped into place and the gray three-seater situated just where I wanted it in my living room, my dad promptly sat down and fell asleep while the rest of us unpacked. New silverware, new crockpot, new television. Old bed frame, old mattress, old dresser that was much better than the new ones because the drawers were deeper and could hold more clothes. The convergence of old and new slowly crept up on me as the cabinets filled and our energy waned; not only was today moving day and the start of a new adventure, one I took on for me, but it was also the day of my high school class’s ten-year reunion. While I was looking forward to the future, the people I went to high school with, some of whom I had known since I was a toddler in pre-school, were on a boat cruising Lake Erie. I didn’t feel like looking back. I wanted to move forward.  After spending so much of my post-college twenties feeling stuck and unable to move in any direction for any reason, I wasn’t sold on an occasion to reminisce when I had this opportunity to be what I had always wanted to be — and had spent a good chunk of time denying — staring me in the face.

That apartment became a safe place for me despite being so far away from, well, almost everything I had known for twenty-eight years. It was the place where I learned so much about myself, but where I also had to begin encountering myself and who I was on my own. It was the place where I started writing the essays that would eventually end up as a memoir that I still have tucked away on my hard drive. It was the place where I started figuring out that home doesn’t have to be permanent.

At the end of that first year in Cincinnati, I would move across the apartment complex because the university said that, if I wanted to stay there, I had to have a roommate. Even with the move across the complex, I still found my corner apartment with plenty of afternoon sunshine, a balcony where I could sit and listen to the sounds of the neighborhood, where I could still smell the foods my neighbors cooked while I willingly and deeply inhaled the scent of unknown ingredients.

On that day, as we unloaded boxes from the truck and unpacked this new apartment, I knew this was the start of a new beginning. The next ten years would involve a lot of excitement, exploring, and growing, but also tears, anxieties, and another move that took me four hundred miles from Cincinnati and almost seven hundred miles from home. A global pandemic would upend what the world looked like for everyone, not just me, and I would learn just what it takes to be both someone who made a decision to put themselves first and to use that decision to help lift others up. Amidst the uncertainties of what would come next – would I get into the next school, would I get a job, would I get a job that could support me, would I would I would I.

The next ten years from that moving day would show me that chasing your dreams wherever they called you meant something, that looking back and looking forward mean different things for different people. For me, that balance of reflection and anticipation meant realizing which box to unpack first and, in that moment, unloading that box from a moving truck was the first step in my right direction.

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Ashley Anderson’s work has appeared in Quarter After Eight, Permafrost, Newfound, Tahoma Literary Review, Wraparound South, SLAB, Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, and others.  She holds a PhD in English with a creative writing emphasis from the University of Missouri and MA degrees from the University of Cincinnati and Kent State University.  Ashley currently teaches first-year composition with some Taylor Swift mixed in at the University of Missouri and, when she isn’t writing or teaching, can be found making something she found somewhere online.  Her debut essay collection, Sifting the Feminine: Essays on a Woman’s Body, is forthcoming from the University of Georgia Press.