Moving out, moving on

I am moving house next week. Didn’t quite expect it to come this soon but renting is as renting does, and so it goes. I have found a new place, it seems lovely, and so are the people there, but-

I’m going to talk about moving.

It feels embarrassing to mourn a place that isn’t yours.

And yet I have been grieving for three weeks. It’s not particularly persistent or pervasive, but sometimes I walk down the stairs to my flat and feel a melancholy that aches in the base of my throat that soon it will be over.

I’ve only lived here for four years. That’s not even 1/7th of my life. I’ve had so many flatmates, seen so many sunsets — it’s barely anything.

And yet, I’m mourning.

This flat on the edge of a hill in Northland has bird song that’s always a little too loud in the morning. The balcony gets so hot in summer that it burns my feet, and the floorboards always feel like they’re about to give way.

But it’s still my home — even if it’s a home that I don’t own, have never owned, will never own.

Is this all there is? A bequeathing of self to a landlord forever? Moving out, moving on, finding one’s place in a new home every year? I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of reestablishing myself as a normal human being to new flatmates; reassuring them that my quirks, my sleeplessness, my art, my me is perfectly normal and rational and definitely not from a brain that’s like a little bag of cats, a little torn at the edges, with a little tang. There is no housing market for people like me, no chance of a respite.

Flatting, it feels like forever, and I guess this loss must be too.

I always feel attached to places. It’s often where I start first when I’m writing, and I spend hours exploring the nooks and crannies of cities that people leave behind. You might have read one of my earlier pieces, about O Waiapu — a former Guiding house that I spent a lot of time in — losing that place felt like this too. A metaphorical losing of keys, a ghost, a gap in the map in my mind.

It’s like that again. That loss.

In this house, I’ve seen out two long lockdowns, upwards of 15 flatmates, and several medical emergencies. I had COVID here, rested for weeks and weeks and weeks while my broken leg healed, and called Healthline in the middle of the night more than once.

I spent a lot of time being so sad that it ran down into my feet, clenched my toes, and threatened to spill out across the mattress. Sleepless trying to find some sense, some logic in the pervasive wrongness and discord that hung in my bones.

I tutored a horror film paper via Zoom, squinting at six tiny faces at a time on my cell phone that I’d blu-tacked to the wall because we were locked down and my computer was broken.

But then there were the good times.

Writing and rehearsing Declarations of Love in my tiny lounge, with the same lounge feeling even tinier when we stuffed 7 people at a time into it for DETECTED! rehearsals. Long, beautiful chats on a couch that threatened to swallow everyone who sat on it. A splinter of intimacy, a tiny frisson, the metaphorical change of boundaries when someone you don’t know all that well steps into your house, into your room, sits on your bed.

D&D and TSL over the internet, and performing theatre via Facebook Live. Filming late into the night, running the gauntlet with our downstairs neighbours who hopefully didn’t mind (some of them did). Holding those in the distance close through their worst hours, and them reciprocating in mine. Discovering podcasts and games that my buds love and I loved them too.

Learning to cook dumplings, birria, bagels. Getting into scrapbooking. Getting back into geocaching. Sitting in a duvet cave recording lines. Testing out outfits 1000 times in the bathroom mirror. Falling in love. Falling out of love. Discovering attachment in a way that finally made sense. Endless schemes.

Relearning how to sew. Gaming with my mates. Writing. Patting cats that lived next door. Delirious and exhausted late at night but not wanting to cut a conversation short. Writing. Singing too loudly even when my flatties were home. Cutting off my hair. Writing. Being with my people. Becoming more me than I was.

It wasn’t much, but it was my place for four long years.

And I’ll miss it.