Christmas in October

If you've ever packed up your life and moved--next door, across town, around the world, it doesn't matter--then you will be familiar with the feeling of dread that sits on your chest while you pack your life up, simultaneously sneezing from all the dust. Dread because, even if you are excited (and I was), when you begin to question when you became that packrat (not quite a TLC hoarders special but...) that's really only the start of the existential crisis. 

Fortunately my moving-savvy friends reminded me that on the grade scale of Life Experiences, moving is up there as one of the most stressful. Dartmouth University even has the life change index scale that you can calculate how many stress points your current life is at (google it, for serious). 

Not needing to calculate the metrics of how much I'd blown up our lives, I settled for packing up the flat in a scattergun move from this room to that room, throwing my life's hoarding into four piles: donation; storage; packing in suitcases; packing into boxes for shipping. Paul continued working from home around my daily meltdowns.  Sometimes we'd have a whole argument, from start to end, in under five minutes. He's a minimalist and I'd prefer not to live in a white-walled asylum. Yin and yang. 

TLDR: moving is shit. We survived. 

And now it's October, we're nearing the half term break and I poorly calculated in the best way possible when the boxes we (I) packed would arrive. Due to geopolitics, the typhoon season and other end-of-the-world moments, our boxes took the long way around the horn of Africa, getting stuck in an unusually long customs queue in Singapore. And yet, they still arrived one month earlier than I anticipated.

So today I woke up to my seven boxes being delivered. I was nervous; having lived with the two suitcases I brought on the flight for two months it all felt a little unnecessary. The flat's been fine, a little sterile but otherwise fine. Call it residual moving trauma, call it Paul's minimalism rubbing off on me. 

This was short-lived. Staff dropped off my boxes, shut the door behind them and I went to town with my scissors. A frenzied glee took over as I traversed nearly 4k steps pacing between boxes and the two bedrooms. Every unwrapping was like a warm hug from my past life coming to greet me, reminding me I am both the person who packed these boxes two months ago and the person I am today. There were tears; it was a genuine reunion. I spent the day in a state of glimmer and joy. (And yes, Frank's hot dog costume was at the top of one of the boxes.)

So now the flat is decked in textiles, giant cushions, artwork, prints and postcards from our travels. Tonight I used my stick blender to make my favourite soup and opened a beer with the bottle opener that should have gone in my suitcase. It made a change from using a teaspoon to mutilate the lid open.

It's not quite our London flat but we're not quite our London selves. And that makes this 34-degree October Christmas day so very full of promise.