Just slap my bindle and feed me dumpster beans, we are now officially homeless people. And jobless people. We are bums. There’s no beating around the bush. Let’s not glamorize this. We are now a thing that people dress up as ironically for Halloween. We are crashing at a friends’ house that required us to hop a fence to enter. Our last 24 hours of food intake can only accurately be described as scavenging. And David is now dressing like an angsty 13 year old who asked a mystical carnival game to make him regret his wish. Oh, that was always? Well we also we haven’t even fully packed for our multi-month trip yet. So there?
And really, the only takeaway we feel capable of seeing right now, is that this was extremely hard. We are both well acquainted with leaving apartments, jobs, and responsibilities. But this was devastating to an unexpected degree. The past few days have been an overwhelming maelstrom of mistakes, stress, and uncertainty, punctuated briefly by joyous warm currents of excitement, love, and (however rarely) success.
In trying to identify what exactly created this lightly-gilded house fire; this rose-colored missile crisis; this tsunami that also brought Clooney’s yacht into the city, I’ve landed on 5 things that make this different from all the other moves, quits, and brazen life adjustments. They are as follows:
Packing for a trip while packing for a move is a nightmare.
This is something we honestly didn’t put enough thought into, but there’s a reason you don’t typically follow up a move with a travel adventure. Because it isn’t smart. It’s kind of like making a Thanksgiving dinner for lunch prior to making actual Thanksgiving dinner. Not only do you have to deal with careful ingredient allocation, overlapping prep times, and multiple preheat temps, but by the time you’re done you’ll be very fucking sick of turkey. Especially when it becomes apparent that you have way more turkey than you ever needed in the first place…
We have entirely too much stuff.
Our apartment was a standard one bedroom. We rented a moving truck and a storage unit that by all estimates should have been enough for 2-2.5 bedrooms. We barely fit. Now some of this has to do with the fact we’ve lived in one place for 3+ years and that we’ve had a recent influx of wedding gifts. But still, what’s wrong with us? With all of the other logistical stresses of this situation, which the volume of our stuff certainly contributed to, dealing with the realization that we definitely have a diagnosable hoarding condition didn’t make the final hours in our apartment the most pleasant, which was especially distressing because…
Our apartment was legitimately the greatest.
It began as our refuge from shiv welding monsters. It became our beautiful first home together. It was our cellar for rare beer. It was our test kitchen. It was our proposal destination. It was an elaborate excuse to justify the existence of our beloved balcony. It was our movie theater and concert hall. It was our hospitality center for visiting friends and family. It was our front row seat to the Air and Water Show. It was our travel memory display case. And while leaving was inevitable at some point, the predictable separation anxiety from a living rectangle this sentimentally pregnant was amplified and ignited under the sunny day magnifying glass that is Changeapalooza 2018 (headliners: Change the Rapper, Changel Olson, and like Ringo Starr or something)…
How much change is too much?
We got married in September. Since then we’ve been changing names and combining accounts and doing all the spousal shit that in any normal year would register as pretty monumental. But then you throw an emotional move into the mix. Then add a good old fashioned double job jettison. Then throw it all into the Megtrip planning pressure cooker and remember all that cute marriage stuff?
We know it’s important to keep the big picture in mind during all of this, and a week from today we’ll exist in a different headspace we’ve never really occupied before. But right now, with the amount of carpets we’ve intentionally removed from beneath us (and placed into storage), it’s kind of hard to think past what needs to happen immediately. It isn’t easy to see the forest for the trees during a wildfire. Also the forest is actually a sand dune. Also the sand dune is flooding. See what I mean?
BUT, this is exhilarating uncharted ground.
There’s that Clooney yacht gold dust! Beneath all the re-re-packing, tearful sitcom finale room exits, and a building that somehow thought it was a good idea to give us the loading dock during trash pickup, there was the faint glimmer of understanding throughout that we are doing something profoundly different. I’m really not going to romanticize Megatrip that much. In the grand scheme of daring decisions, packing up and leaving honestly doesn’t rank too high. But there is something to be said for, after 30 years of being alive, doing something you truly haven’t done before. And maybe that’s all that seeing the proverbial forest has to be for now. Not realizing any greater depth or gravity to this, but recognizing that doing something distinctly new can be purpose enough.
In the end, we feel like we just watched Breaking Bad’s Ozymandias for the first time. Physically drained, emotionally wrecked, unsure of Jesse Pinkman’s ultimate fate, but still certain that what we just went through was essential. Here’s hoping we nail the next episode (hold up, hey). It starts in three days.
