Relocation, relocation, relocation...

The project this month is… moving.

Moving house, uprooting, disorganizing, reorganizing, categorizing, packing, oh god, the packing. All of it is stressful in a very physical way. I just hauled my cement block of a television up a flight of narrow wooden stairs to get it to my apartment door. Two steps from the top and you’re still miles away. Believe me, that’s the stress that keeps on giving.

However. It is also, I suspect, the most difficult part of the physical furniture moving. And it’s done.

Other things, not so much. There’s my cat, 16 years old and the feline equivalent of a cockroach: he will live forever and one day conspire with the Heart of Darkness (aka Sophie, my sister’s bunny) to take over the world. That said, he is still 16, still arthritic, and recently recovering from what may have been a small stroke. It swells the brain. He’s been treated, he’s doing well. But moving him… Ouch, in so many ways. On the one hand, do I want to relocate him, make him learn another haunt, meet new younger cats? On the other, he’s my cat, we snuggle every single night, he has a thing for ample-chested women because they are squashy and comfortable; how in the world am I going to get used to not having him there? On a third hand, because everyone should have a third hand: giant raccoons living in trees by my complex + consummate outdoor geriatric cat = oh no oh no oh god no.

But either way, I’m moving.

So, packing. Unpacking. Redistributing. Ripping up the home I know and hoping like hell that it’ll still hold the power to house me once I reassemble it in, let’s face it, a totally alien place. Yes, it’s a nice apartment, but it won’t be my home for a while. Maybe never, because I’ve lived in places that never became my home. I’m whiplashing back and forth between euphoria at finally having my own space and a terrible sense of misery and loss.

I think you just have to push through it, though. Can’t go around it, can’t wait for it to dissipate because then it just looms larger and larger in the corner of your eye. Wade firmly into the upheaval, hurt for a while, but shove through because eventually, things turn, dust settles. You hang that picture on the wall and step back and go, “Oh, there you are.”

And there it is.