Tuesday 4 January 2011

Home-less.

Yesterday I moved out of my temporary home.

For two months my boy and I have been equipped with a three-storey house, a main coon cat, a ridiculous poodle and as many long country walks as our hearts could possibly desire. An impermanent family. A short-term settling. A safe way of checking if we like each other enough to try it again, at another time, as grown-ups.

Surrounded by boxes, surprised at what can be accumulated in 60 days, a sense of loss hits me.

Admittedly, it was hardly a five star. It was dark, it was cold, and it frequently smelt of shit, (despite the high-breeding, the animals are not so well trained). But faced with the thought of a life without our stinking little homestead, I can’t help but look back with fondness. Decorating our baby Christmas tree, being snowed in with only chicken dippers and ketchup for sustenance, New Years Eve with friends and drinks and shrieking arguments on all three floors. All of which are times I won’t forget in a hurry. It may have been a smelly, tumbledown ghost-shack, but it was ours.

I think we are all accustomed to a little attachment. Nostalgia’ll get you. Any prolonged amount of time anywhere and we build routines, systems for living. I went with my mum to a meal for the homeless on Christmas day, clearly not very helpful on the cooking front, I spent most of the time chatting to a paranoid man who lived in the woods for a number of years, and surprisingly enough, he was quite attached to it.

I move again in a few months, after finally deciding to go to university, I’ll be living in Norwich for three years. I hope that however anxious I might be at the thought of halls, time will provide me with attachment. But not too much.

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