Facebook memories has really turned out to be both a blessing and a curse. When it comes to memories, I would say that I am pretty confident about remembering people and places and things that were said. Then Facebook memories had to come around and remind me that there are also things I’ve done a really good job of blocking out such as bad wardrobe choices, friends that are no longer around, places that my world used to revolve around, and the words!! Oh, all of the words I wished I had never said.

But for each bad memory, there are 10 more good ones that sprout up next to it and for this reason I look forward to my Facebook memory notification everyday. July and August is a particularly fun time to look back on because that’s when all the mushy and silly pre-Philastasia things began and it’s fun to see how different we were and how much our love has grown and changed since then.

Just recently this week one of my favorite pictures came up from four years ago and it still fills my heart up with so much joy. It was the wedding night of one of my very best friends and it had been a long day of celebrating and wedding songs and wedding toasts and dancing our feet straight out of our heels and loudly screaming every single last word to “Call Me Maybe” and giggling at all of the inside jokes.

But at the end of the night, when it was just me and Philip dancing together, this candid picture was taken and it perfectly captures how he makes me feel: loved, supported, special, smart, needed, and so much more. Here we are on the eve of an adventure to NYC together, on our last night in Los Angeles as boyfriend and girlfriend. The next morning we will leave for a week spent staying at our friend’s apartment in NYC and in just a few days, Philip is going to propose to me in the most romantic little spot in Central Park on our one year anniversary – but, when this picture is taken, I have no clue just how much happier he is going to make me as a fiance and how blessed we are going to be in our marriage.

Remind me again how I got so lucky?!

But among all of these memories, both in my head and on Facebook, there is one place I am not ready to say goodbye to. I have spent so long separating emotion from responsibility because my head knew the reality of the situation; but now that I am faced with the very real and impending moment of escrow closing on my mom’s home, my heart is breaking. And when I say my mom’s home, I really mean “our home” – my siblings, my grandparents, my aunt, my cousins, the neighborhood kids from 1970 to 2016, the friends that have come and gone, the best friends who spent whole summers living and crashing on our couch.

I guess I am finding out that I never quite believed that this would happen. This house has only ever belonged to our family and now… in just a few short weeks, it will officially belong to another family for the first time in history. Such a small action of my mom signing escrow papers has brought on a constant video reel of memories that replay throughout my days…It’s really a good thing escrow has an expiration date because I don’t know how much more of this I can handle.

And yet, at the same time, the clock is ticking and I am itching to squeeze in as much as I can with the house that is definitely a family member to all of us. How do I find a way of telling my job that I need a month of sick days to visit a dying family member, who is actually a house, after just coming back from 4 months of maternity leave?! Trying to figure this out now while simultaneously drowning my sadness in tea & chocolate.