Moving Out and On

-Ashley Allard

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Often the things that are the most important are the most difficult to capture with words. Poets have managed to wrangle the abstract beasts of love and mourning with metaphors and chewy similes and some of them can stand victoriously over the conquered animal, a work of art subdued. But, the most beautiful things are difficult to even name.

The persistent change of your twenties is one of them; beautiful, evergreen and bittersweet. Life in your early twenties has been compared to many things. I like to compare it to a tempestuous sea, the saltwater probably entirely of your own making with waves and sunsets that defy divinity. It is incredibly exhausting making so many life-altering decisions - that often don’t even appear to be life-altering at first glance - in such a short period of time. One grows so fast that one cracks the pot one lives in; you must be repotted, at least once or twice (hence the prominent adolescent yearning for a new life and new name on some remote Grecian island, far away from anything you have ever known and anything that has ever known you).

One of the elements that may give you the illusion of stability - the lifeboat in the raging current- are the spaces you call home during your twenties; your shared res room, your digs with more flatmates than legally allowed, your bachelor apartment with the crooked curtain rails and broken stove. But, these spaces also change constantly, the moving van is always just around the corner...

If you live in a university town, this perpetual movement becomes heartbreakingly clear every November, when you can’t even park because of all the moving vans. You hold the elevator door open for the faces you would give quick nods to in the hallway as they carry out their life in an arrangement of boxes labelled Fragile or Kitchen. You watch the cigarette-burned armchairs and wine-stained tables drift down the highway, out and away to a new place which will soon be called Home. Here, extra sets of keys will be made and shared with neighbours and soulmates of a different kind, and soon the dinner parties and the cracked bathroom tiles of yester-room are forgotten.

Your first apartment, however, is cemented into your being, a chamber in the brain, the furniture decked out and the windows slightly open. It is a fundamental part of your identity and remains so, the room number being one you circle on lottery tickets and pray for during Sunday bingo.

Your mother will always hate something about your first apartment. The tiny kitchen, where the stove is inconveniently shoved alongside the fridge and the shower hangs precariously over the bathtub, where the tap drip-drip-drips throughout the day. You see all these things, too, but only become more enamoured with the home, and the wooden tiles and dust motes that float in delicate rays of five o’clock sun. It is perfect and it is you.

But now it is December and it is time to leave. How to pack a life into fifteen small boxes you bargained the Checkers manager for? How to assort, bubblewrap, and stack a year of change and growth and heartbreak in less than a week? When did this become an annual activity?

You have not started packing yet, although you should have. All your friends have taken down their curtains and handed over their keys (keeping a spare for sentimental reasons), and you do not even own a roll of bubble wrap (yet). Instead, every morning tea is brewed with melancholy and every walk home is subdued with a tidal wave of thoughts where you try to remember why you are leaving your Home in the first place. Why wouldn’t you remain here, on your checkerboard kitchen tiles, while your sea glass windchime tinkles in the breeze?

(You guess moving out is like dying; Billions of people have done it. Yet, why are you still so scared of the process? Of what lurks afterwards?)

You don’t think of the bad. You push down the thought of the castle slowly being built in your air vent, the wasps busily laying clay as if cementing your being inside. You ignore the emotional weight that lies embedded in the stuffing of your couch. (What those springs must hold! You can feel the lumps forming from all that lingers there, all the conversations that have seeped into the seams: P- tells you, you fucked up; A- tells you he’s infatuated; M- tells you A- lied; D- tells you M- lied; R- asks if he can go down on you. L- tells you she fucked up. O- says he cheated. J- glides his hand up your calf at the housewarming while you count the different liquors lingering in his breath. T- says goodbye).

You move from the couch to the bed and the sinking feeling pulls you lower and lower… you lay down and remember the rumpled mess of sheets, of his hair, of this painful naked vulnerability that cannot be washed away, not even with the Monday laundry load. The baby-blue sheets still send a shiver of shame up your spine. You think about bodies tangled up like a heat knot in the back of your hair; inconvenient, painful to get out and not meant to happen. You hear the words he whispered and feel them cling to the popcorn walls, and watch them become enmeshed in the floorboard cracks. You remember the feeling of effervescent anticipation crowding the negative space (smaller, smaller, smaller still), the buzz still lingering in the quiet of the two-a.m. dark. And you see the tears coating the floor, a wetness with which to mop.

But at the same time, it happened. In this little place you call your own. Your keys jangle on the plate of green malachite as it tumbles onto loose coins and stones from the beach. They are yours. The key to the place that you had and have… until the lease ends in January. And you will give the keys over to someone new, who will probably not write poetry about the sweet smell of spring or the snap of jacaranda pods in autumn. Instead, they will put their bed somewhere else, disrupting the Feng shui. They will not dance in the kitchen while brownies bake or tap the burning joint against the window pane and watch the ash trickle into the overgrown flowerbed. They will not live in here like you have. And you can’t stomach that, but you prefer it, too.

But you will always have the stars on the way home. They will be the same ones that linger over your new roof and watch as you open your new door. A new address. A new number to look for on the lottery pages. (But you keep your spare set of keys, for sentimental reasons, and run your fingers over the grooves and hear how they used to slide into the lock).