Welcome Mat

Last night we started packing our belongings in the boxes Simon brought home from work. They filled the entire back of the Element, and once home they stacked halfway to the ceiling and the entire length of the gold couch, which for the next two weeks will be known as the heavy couch. Funny how one's feelings change toward something one knows one will be schlepping in the near future.

Also weighing differently on the scales my affections right now are the three hundred(?) books (I should count them), the two hundred(?) records (Simon can count those), the seventy-five or so DVDs and VHS tapes (some of which we borrowed from Will two years ago and haven't returned), and the twenty-eight binders of CDs (one for every letter of the alphabet minus P-Q and X-Y-Z, plus one for holiday tunes and one for classical tunes and one for compliations and one whole binder for Little Feat). Last night we gingerly tetrised together about a quarter of the above and then, poof, we were already out of boxes. Our big first night of packing had lasted a mere forty minutes, so we sat back, shook out some honey martinis, and watched a movie.

Although this will only be my third ever move, I had a pretty good idea of what my process would be like over the next few weeks: the simultaneous weeping and smiling, the uber-organized plan and its subsequent sloppy implementation, the eventual relinquishing of myself to cardboard-cube chaos. I only moved in with Simon eight months ago, remember, so it's all still pretty fresh in my mind. According to my schedule, last night should have been spent cleaning the apartment so that I could then take pictures of every last square inch of the place looking its spit-shined best so I can remember it that way forever and ever. Instead, I just stepped over the stack of magazines and the cat barf, and grabbed a box, a roll of tape, and a Sharpie. Let's get this show on the road.

Although I'll be sad to the leave the apartment that's been a part of our lives for almost two years now, there's something about this move that's making it easier for me than the rest. Perhaps it's that I'm so glad to be leaving the neighborhood; perhaps it's that I'm so excited to be living in our funhouse. Of course, it helps that I'm moving with my beloved into Our First Home, a life choice that comes with all the standard and obvious implications of domestic grandeur. To outsiders (i.e., everyone but us), it's the validation of our realtionship that's been lacking (for them) in the absence of a diamond ring. For us it's just the achievement of something we always knew would happen eventually (although we each anticipated that eventuality with a different degree of impatience), and so yes, this is HUGE, but it's not exactly a surprise.

No, the factor that's making me able to tape up a box full of CDs without breaking out into a tear-jerked "Sunrise, Sunset" is, I think, that I'm not leaving anything behind. The one thing I know for sure we're getting rid of is the microwave (the new place has one built in over the range), and while that's sad because it's the microwave my parents bought for me when I broke up with my fiance and found myself suddenly living alone and without an appliance to cook my food from the inside out in ninety-seconds or less, giving up a three-year-old microwave is a world away from hawking my childhood memories on the street.

Simon's sister, Mel, who moved with her husband into their first house last fall, said we'll probably be surprised by the amount of room we have, even after all the furniture is in place in the new house. She teased me with the words "minimalist" and "clutter-free," and to me they were like someone offering me cherry red Lamborghini--not to my natural persuasion, but I'll take it in a heartbeat if the offer arises. Simon and I are collectors (witness the books and records and cds and scotch) so I suspect any empty spaces will not be empty for long, but it's still nice to dream. At the very least, we will have room for our guests to sit, in a dining room even, and on seats that aren't attached to frames sporting wheels and handlebars.

Finally, and here it's about to get a little cryptic, I'm excited to be in the new place (and less attached to the old) because we can have people over and welcome them into our home and our life in a way we couldn't before. Both literally and figuratively, our first years together have been spent in partial isolation from some former and semi-former friends and semi-friends, and although we opened our doors to all comers, our apartment was mostly a cocoon built for two. Since I can't talk specifics about the figurative parts, I'll instead talk about the literal parts by saying that when we invited seventy-two people to our housewarming party in January and only eight showed up, there really was only room in our apartment for those eight, which is to say that our lives then were not such that all fifty invited guests could have felt welcome in the same way they can be now, in our new house, in our new life, or so we hope. If only there were room in the hot tub for everybody at the same time.

So while this is, like my two other previous moves, the end of an era (the Era of Freezing My Ass Off in the House? the Era of Wanting to Dig Out My Eardrums with a Grapefruit Spork So I Don't Have to Hear the Alarm/Dog/Fighting/Tuba One More Time?), it's mostly a continuation, of the Era of Luv, if you'll forgive me this moment of preciousness (no, you're schmoopy!). I see this move not so much as a "first" but as one in a long line of "next"s. This is our next home, the next place we'll make our own, the next place we'll line up our whisky, the next place we'll wake up next to each other and wonder how in the hell we got so lucky.

wrote Leah at 6:38 AM | Comments (10)