Moving On

Photo by Oddsock. License through Creative Commons

This week, while we’re sprucing up the house, trying to sell it so we can move across town, we get a call from my older daughter Zoe, saying she and her boyfriend have found an apartment in Boston. Suddenly eighteen years vanish and for this week’s Brit-on-Public-Radio essay I’m back at another act of cleaning and moving.

Moving out of my apartment was like pulling off a Band-Aid and taking the scab too: hidden, unhealed memories and emotions began leaking out, and as the morning wore on and the movers tramped slowly in and out, dismantling a life, I felt myself moving backwards in time.

The day started in the present, or even the near future, with me calling people to give them my new address, and removing my identity from the place, taking my name off the electricity, the gas, the cable TV.

Almost at once, though, I began looking backwards, mooching through closets, severing and tying off the loose ends of the past like small veins. No, I would never wear those suede trousers again; no, those pine boards would never come in handy after all, and I should chuck them out of the back door onto the growing pile of debris.

The most recent memories surfaced first, while the apartment still looked familiar. The fake bat on the bedroom ceiling was a reminder of last Hallowe’en. The living-room furniture was testimony to the presence of my girlfriend, who moved in last January, rearranged the chairs and couch every other month, and
is now moving with me to the new apartment, where the same furniture will follow the same periodic dance.

But the more clutter was boxed up and carried out, the more the apartment looked the way it did in the first few months: underfurnished, lonely, barely functional. Those were ghastly times. My second wife and I had separated, and when my daughter, not yet four, came over I was desperately aware that this was not yet a home; she was scared of her room, scared of the dark corridor upstairs, of the strange noises that leaked through from the next apartment. The first few nights she clung to me, frantic; I tried to reassure her, but I felt as if I had drunk acid and was waiting to die.

It’s a disturbing thing, this living backwards. I told myself that everything had turned out for the best, that she was just that week starting first grade, as robust and happy as a child could wish to be, but even so.

In the end, though, it was the apartment itself that cut loose my uneasy memories and sent them floating off harmlessly, like cobweb.

Now it was quite empty, just as I’d first seen it, after checking out a dozen expensive, smelly dumps, and I’d thought, Yes, this is the place for us. The apartment was now itself. My history had peeled away from it, layer by layer, like wallpaper. Wind blew through the trees outside; a butterfly flickered between the tomato plants.

I sat on a windowsill in silence, thinking, I didn’t do so badly, all things considered, thinking This must be how we are after we die: emptied of everything but our character, unencumbered, full of light.