Unheimlich

As I listen to Michael Vaughan saying how important it is that England get off to a good start I can’t help but nod in gentle agreement. If you can make your bed while all around are soiling theirs.

So. I have moved. In fact, most everything has moved. It is Ginger, the recalcitrant cat himself, who has, as usual, summed up everything. A yowl, a prowl, a sulky sitting in the hallway without even so much as a swipe as I shimmy past. It is this strange, rather subdued mog which somewhat sums up exactly how I feel.

I am shell-shocked, startled, stupified, stultified …

It is as if everything has fallen apart, as if it has had its supports ripped from under it. And, of course, that is roughly what really happens when one leaves everything. When a relationship collapses, when you leave a flat which worked particularly well with your world, when work disintegrates and leaves you feeling flat and foolish, when your body continually cracks up, crumbles and breaks.

Two years I have spent in the same flat with the same flatmate with (pretty much) the same girl doing pretty much the same thing. Of course habits change, the world adjusts and stretches and contracts depending on the circumstances. Then, all of a sudden, the girl, the flat, the flatmate … all change … well, from girl to … from flatmate to … from flat to … plus ca change, mais bugger me, what the fuck is going on?

There are several problems with this whole situation. The main problem is the lack of closure, my apparent inability to stop nibbling at the brownies as they cool, to stop picking at my sores and then wondering why the blood flows.

I won’t explain everything. Why? Because there is too much history, too much ‘stuff’ to even consider trying to explain it. Each time I read it I would be adding tiny notes as I remembered some newness. I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from thinking what was being said as the words were read.

Traditionally, moving domicile is an exciting, even romantic occasion. A long, hard and frantic day of lugging boxes and packing vans and dropping sofas and scraping knuckles following a week or three of progressively less serene box-packing. The day ends and the music starts and the wine is opened and the pizza or Indian (why capital I and not p?) is unwrapped and you sit, tired but happy, munching, drinking, and thinking where you’re going to fuck each other first.

Not me. Days of boxes. The old flat still isn’t empty. No pizza, no wine, no ‘christening’ … not even my flat yet, as the previous tenant doesn’t move until thursday.

Stranger in a strange room. My possessions. My cat. My company. And yet unheimlich.