Hestia with Icarusian Tendencies

New Year’s Eve, 2004. 9:30 p.m.

I put my jewelry box, my current book, some food, and my purse into a small box. I’m getting ready for my last trip from my mother’s apartment in Redwood City to the apartment I will be sharing with my boyfriend and a couple friends in Mountain View. I’m on the phone with my father.

“You can’t move in with him, Jennifer! You’re twenty! You don’t know what you’re doing! What if you get pregnant?!”

“Dad, I am moving in with him. You’re right, I don’t know what I’m doing - I’ve never done this before! But it’s my decision. I’ve already moved most of my stuff over there, and am packing up the last box as we speak. I’m going.”

He hangs up on me, and I hand the phone back to my mom, relatively unfazed. He will probably complain to my mom later about the way she has raised me, but at this point, I really don’t care. I grab my stuff and my mom walks me to the front door, opening it for me. I put down the box, give her a hug, and kiss her on the cheek.

“I love you, Mama.”

“I love you, too, baby. Drive safe.”

That was the shortest move away from home I have ever made, in terms of both distance and time. Mountain View was no more than 15 minutes from my mom’s, but I only stayed in that apartment for a few months - not because of homesickness or issues with my boyfriend, as my dad predicted, but because of the other roommates. In fact, my boyfriend and I were fine; we would actually make another move together, to Chico, only a year later.

I have always had the support of my parents. I’m an only child and a very independent person. My mom trusts me to take care of myself, and she knows I’ll visit often (I’m too close to my friends and family in the Bay Area to stay away for long). My dad is ultimately supportive of me, but he makes it known when he doesn’t agree with whatever decision is at hand. The saving grace of my relationship with my father is that my education is as important to me as it is to him: he pays my tuition, and I keep bringing home the grades that show him it’s all worth it.

I haven’t told him yet that I want to spend a year in Paris.

Education, to him, is classes: books, notes, lectures, the uncomfortable desk, and the older, wiser figure standing in front of the chalkboard (he still believes in chalkboards). For me, education is a life process of going out into the whatever part of the world strikes my fancy and talking to the people in their language, seeing the art and architecture, tasting the food, listening to the music and the language…education, to me, is actively absorbing the world.

I am torn.

I have two cats, three bookshelves, and many, many boxes of old notebooks and papers. My favorite thing to do at the end of the day is to come home, snuggle under a blanket, and open a book (any one of the few I am reading at the time). I am a home-body. I don’t like crowds, or people, in general, for extended periods of time. My night life usually consists of watching a documentary of some kind and drinking a beer with my best friend-cum-roommate.

With the spirit of Icarus and the body of Hestia, I find myself restless and discontent, in limbo. My fiancé and I broke up over a year ago because I felt trapped. My restlessness had come into full being and surfaced to an unbearable tension. I wasn’t ready for what I had; I couldn’t make myself settle down. I still can’t. However, I have settled to the point where my home, my Hestian “hearth,” is inside myself. I can take it with me anywhere: I ‘m home when I’m at school; I’m home when I’m at the used bookstore downtown; I’m home when I’m having coffee with a friend; I’m home when I visit the family and friends I have left behind, not for the last time, in Redwood City.