Ending and Beginning

We tore down my old office today.  It was just a closet, jammed into an upstairs corner of an old building, and jammed full of computers, but it was my closet, and while most of the computers there weren't technically mine, they sure felt like it after eight or so years in that little room.  I made like 3 or 4 games, plus a training simulator there, in those years, and the room had become littered with the debris of those programming sessions--to-do lists, data sheets, scrawled equations and notes and diagrams from problems long solved or abandoned.  All of this, we cleared away today, sorting the trash from the treasure, and good memories from bad, and throwing away anything we didn't want or need.  How many bytes of obsolete, unwanted information were lost today, and how many over those eight years?  

I suppose it's always like this when you move--it certainly was when I left my old apartment in Ohio and made the long trek, an epic quest across the US, following the rough path of old Route 66 across the hills and plains and mountains and deserts of this country.  It was like that a bit when we left the old office for the new one--in the old office there were other workers, and so it was big and crowded with the stuff of multi-person teams.  Much of this got tossed aside when the other workers left and only I chose to remain.  This proved a good decision, as it kept me employed during those eight years, and gave me games and simulations under my belt--I'm an experienced programmer now, and not merely a well-educated one.  Still, this era of my life--the Closet Office era, you could call it, is over now.  The room is once again empty, as it was when I first saw it, and realized how much smaller my world would become.  It's funny how big it looks now, with all the stuff cleared out.  It was full of a lot of things, but mostly it was full of me.  Every object there had been placed where it was by me, thrown into a corner or under a table in search of a bit of free space, and as I cleaned it out, those memories came back to me, yet I wasn't sad.  

Yesterday I was--I broke down sobbing as I turned off computers that had sat in their spots for years: computers that I had turned off every afternoon, and turned on again in the morning.  But this time I would not be doing that--the computers will stay off.  I know that this isn't the end--someday, and soon, I will turn those machines on again, to finish up the miscellaneous tweaks and maintenence builds that any large simulation project has, but I won't be turning them on in my old office, and most of my personal files, the ones that made the computers seem like mine, are gone now.  I've still got them, of course, but at home, they're not the same.  

Nonetheless, today was closure--the end of an era, but the beginning of a new one.  I start a new job on Monday, which is better in pretty much every way than the one I had.  I will be working with people again, and not stuck alone in my little office, where I was the good, quiet neighbor that the other people in the building always say but never interacted with much.  I will be making more money, and working in a nicer place.  My old job will become just an occasional maintenence task, nothing more, not even really a job at all.  My new one will become my life as my old one had been since I moved out here nine years previously.  The future looks good for me, but the past still calls, faded and dusty with years of accumulated fallout from the dirty old heating ducts of a refurbished hotel.

When I moved out here, for a long time afterward, I couldn't look at a map of Ohio, or really of the eastern US at all, without breaking down in tears.  I had been ripped from my old ground and transplanted into unfamiliar, sandy California soil.  Eventually, though, I put down new roots and this place became my home.  I can look at maps of Ohio, or pictures of that state, or even go back to visit and return here without any problems.  Most of these roots are still there--in the form of my friends I have out here, and even my old boss and those computers that served me so well.  One root has been severed, but I know this is not truly an end, or rather, that all ends are beginnings as well, as the wheel of my life turns and the new comes to replace the old.  Already I am feeling better, though sort of hollow, as if a part of me was surgically removed, and the incision healed over by magic.  I know that come Monday everything will get better.  But for now, I shed one tear for the life I led so far, and smile, for the one that still awaits.