Moving out, back and on

I officially dropped the keys to my central Huddersfield apartment back at the estate agents office this morning after getting through three whole Steve Coogan audiobooks cleaning and tidying the place up over a four day weekend. It was a very depressive time for me. I would try and make a timelapse of myself but cleaning the oven or refixing the doors of my wardrobe and then lose interest  and start something else. I would eventually lie down in bed with Marie Kondo (her book, 'Spark Joy' not herself  unfortunately) and nod along to the sage advice then feel guilty that I wasn't tidying and compromise with myself by getting back up and not following the method I had just read.

 I usually find moving out to be sad, I can learn to silently acquaint myself with my environment. I take a lot of pleasure in setting up an environment to suit my idiosyncrasies and then hunting down furnishings from the local charity shop to deck out the place to make it an extension of my body. If I were to hang up a caricature of Bob Dylan upside down in the living room of a flatshare people would irritated put him up again, not knowing that he's that way because he's frowning at me for losing the guitar calluses on my finger tips from a lack of practice. That's even assuming I managed to get along with housemates well enough to tolerate my very very occasional caterwauling...

As I was saying my living space is like an extension of my body and the last few days have felt like manually amputating a limb with a blunt wilko loyalty card. A career as an ESOL tutor is will mean a lot of moving and a lot of 'living on the road' as a sort of 21st century itinerate hobo moving on to wherever temporary labour is wanted. Yes its a product of the general instability of the economy and the job market, as much of a hallmark of the millennial generation as conscription was to 20-somethings a hundred years ago. And yet still! I love the romance of being a nomad, the character building it entails and ultimately being forced to never be complacent or take anything for granted. 

And this all a roundabout way of getting to my central point about how the pain of moving out is quickly forgotten but the joy of making first impressions is so easily remembered. The grass is always greener when you first move to somewhere new. When I first moved to Berlin I saw an admirable level of civil courage in the old German lady who shouted 'achtung! halten sie' when I crossed a traffic light on red even though she was probably just reliving her days in the stasi. When I moved to Ireland I saw the inadequacies of google maps and public transport as indicative of an old country luddite romance and felt like writing ballad about the mother dropping off her kids who I had to hitchhike with on my way to Sligo.  When I first moved to america I noticed an overside 'jalepeno icecream' topping option in a pancake diner and as I imbibed in the only sense of disgust I felt was the aftertaste of the cynical  unentrepreneurial cant-do british attitude I was leaving behind.  

While travelling my perception of time itself shifts. This could have to do with jet-lag at first but all the new scents, sights and sounds feed into this sense of being born again. As much as anything particular to León itself, this coming reincarnated is driving me further forward spiritually than the infantilization that comes with briefly having no abode other than my childhood bedroom in my parents house is pulling me back.