You know, considering I only moved about fifty blocks, it’s a little surprising how tough this week has been. I’m over my crying phase, thank goodness, but I think I’ve been walking around with a slightly shell-shocked look on my face. People ask me how I like the new house and I usually say ‘It’s great! I’m tired.” But considering I’ve been through two major cross-country moves, you’d think this one would have been a piece of cake. Not so.
I don’t have any real routines yet, is the thing. Or I have just fragments of them. Like, I have a couple of things in the fridge now but most of my food is still in bags and boxes. I put my stuff in the scarily painted medicine cabinet but I keep forgetting which section has what, causing me to spend multiple minutes fumbling through various bottles and tubes. I can’t remember which faucet in the shower is hot and which is cold. I keep forgetting what I left at the old place and what’s just still in a box somewhere.
It’s okay though. It’s been a busy week because for some reason I’ve been very social; going out after work three nights out of five counts as “very social” for me. This is a good thing. I saw some friends from my Teen Evangelist days Monday…they were nice enough to let me come over even though I was still filthy from moving. Tuesday My Friend Marah and her husband and Gigantic Monster Baby were in town for twelve hours or something and so I hung out with them for a while too. Last time I saw him was over Christmas and had just got himself born, so there wasn’t much to him. I knit him a hat that was awfully and comically too big for him…now, were he to wear it, I don’t think it would fit on his Monster Baby head. It was pretty fun to hang out with him, though I was tired after just an hour or two, so I have newfound respect for mothers who spend all day with their babies every day. This just in: babies = a lot of work, also cute. It’s been good to see people I don’t normally see, of course, but it hasn’t done much for my acclimatization to the house. It’s a very nice house with very nice housemates; I just haven’t spent much time in it with them.
Wednesday, before I went to meet an old friend with whom I’d fallen out of touch since she stopped dating my cousin, I went to the old place to do a little cleaning up and get several necessaries that I’d left there. It was not fun. I need to go back again tomorrow but I’m not looking forward to that disjointed and weird feeling I had when I pulled into the driveway, where everything was the same because I’d only left two days ago and the cats came running to meet me and I had to explain to them that I don’t live there anymore and that was very sad. The apartment looked glareful and trashy and dusty and empty and I decided I only had to stay there for forty minutes and I didn’t have to get all the condiments out of the fridge until I figure out how we’re going to use the fridge space at the new house. I had three bags of garbage by the end of that forty minutes and I’d done the dishes I left in the sink because I am dirty and evil and I’d filled up a canvas shopping bag, a laundry hamper, and a big plastic storage bin with many odds and ends. There are still multiple odds and ends remaining on the various surfaces of the apartment but I am halfway hopeful that by tomorrow’s pedicure appointment I will have taken care of them all and cleaned the joint up and will be free of it.
It does feel like a rather grimy albatross around my neck at the moment…not just because I don’t like cleaning up after myself, apparently, but because it’s too soon and too weird and too much. I don’t understand why, when I make a major change in my life, the rest of the world doesn’t have the basic courtesy to change majorly as well. Why are the hydrangeas still there, and why does the door still stick, and why is the linoleum the same color? How can that house be there without me in it? Is it feeling lonely without me or is it relieved to be rid of my stink and fuss and bother? Is the new house a little uncomfortable with my being there or is it feeling more itself, now that there are three girls living there instead of just two? I think I liked it better when I moved up here from SoCal…I haven’t been back for about four years and am not completely convinced I could even find that apartment complex again, with its bright pink carpet and fake wood trim. Most of my life is the same as it was before Monday…I take the same bus to the same job and I wear the same red suede sneakers and I have the same hair cut and the same hair lady (Hi Zan! I can walk to see Zan now and I’m getting my pedicure done at her salon tomorrow) and the same grocery store and the same car and the same friends and the same everything, almost everything. I still feel transplanted though. I guess I will report back in another week and see if the graft has taken any better.