I've got just about three weeks left in my apartment.
I knew that moving home with my family for a short while would be a challenging transition, but reading the roap map ahead and actually walking the territory are two different things. With only fourteen or so days left, there's not much ground to cover now.
It's such a contradiction half the time, nothing that's really new that I haven't talked about somewhat in the past little while. You wake up, or you come home, and you think "I'm home! This is my place!" It's close to your friends, in a neighbourhood that resonates with your spirit. A place where you can, if you feel like it, parade around in a bath towel (or less), leave as messy or as clean as you want, where you make your own rules. A place where you can be free. And you're filled with some bittersweetness that you're leaving this place soon.
You walk in and you've come home, but you won't be there for long. The situation demands that you savour all the moments, live in the now. You take special notice of the little details: the way the baseboards don't quite align in symmetry with the tile, which was new when you got it; the sound of the elevator rumbling through the wall of your bedroom. Someone upstairs dropping something on the ground and the sound of a car outside on the one road that leads inward. The way the trees and the houses across the street look from your picture window. The luxury of being able to take long showers because the water's included in the rent. That's usually the first hour.
 |
| From when I was moving in a year ago. |
But then, two hours later - hell, sometimes a few minutes later - you find yourself on the phone calling or texting people because you kinda miss people. More than kinda. You really feel like hanging out with someone, or even just knowing you've got someone in the other room that you could talk to if you so wanted. In the second or third hour of being by oneself, you then think...."Meh." And you remember the reason why you're leaving: because a nice apartment completely on your own with no one to talk to, or even just to know is in the other room, is one of the loneliest experiences you can have.
One of the great things about having a Fraternity house, we advise our undergrad brothers, is that there's always something happening in the common room: a PS3 competition, a movie, some discussion about some topic or other. Something. Come and go as you please, stay and talk as long as you want. The common room is always there, and there's always something happening that gives you an opportunity to connect with people with whom you share kinship and shared interests. Within two hours of coming back here, I miss that kind of experience, even though I myself never really had it anywhere else except with my family.
This wasn't always the case: for the first six months after I moved here, I was pretty good on my own, enjoying the solitary time and the freedom of movement. My own place. Hell, my own blog entries back this up. I can't pinpoint the exact moment that everything changed, but these last few weeks have felt like waking up from a dream....
(At the house)
I had started writing that earlier paragraph nearly four days ago now. Since that time, I found new employment in Mississauga, not far from where I am in Brampton. I made sure to learn from my previous experiences and feel out a place that looked like a fit, followed my gut instinct, and been smart about recognizing opportunity when it presents itself. The speed at which everything seems to have led me to here has been incredible and almost a little scary. I'm due to start Wednesday, so like it or not, I'll be spending more time in Brampton than Burlington for what little time remains in that apartment, which is, at this point, simply a storage depot for all my things. There is no Internet. There is no TV. I had both disconnected a month early to save on money. As such, when I'm there, there's very little to do.
Staying there now is just downright depressing, but I have to stick around this weekend for two reasons: to pack up and throw out what remains to be packed up or thrown out; and because I have limited time there, and I want to savour the time. Mind you, I knew that I'd probably get this way going into the experience. Giving up the apartment was a sacrifice that my intended changes demanded.
I always get a little misty about leaving a place (well, except the last move, but that was only because bad stuff happened there), but this one's quite different. This was the first place I'd lived completely on my own as a grown-up. In a way, it completes a cycle. I started life away from home on my own, and I'm ending it that way.
My first time moving out was to Bates Residence at McMaster for my second year of study in 2000-2001. I hadn't gotten along with my roommates too well - three Engineers and one Humanities student do not a stable mixture make - and for much of the winter, I spent a lot of time avoiding the place whenever possible. It was a shitty second term, and after having failed a course in the first semester, I had to overload to make up the credits. Plus, I was a Phikeia (a pledge) for Phi Delta Theta, a
Then, during exam time, and with less than a week to go, I came back to my room one day. It was April, and we were experiencing warm weather for the first time in ages, so I had my window open. The door opened, and I could smell that fresh, earthy smell of rain and grass and mud coming in through the window. The kind that just wakes you up after five months of frozen earth and snow. And I looked around my tiny little bedroom, and realized I was really leaving this place. For good. And I ended up spending most of the remaining six days in that little room, just noticing the things about it.
A favourite memory was Friday morning. My roommates and I were down the hall from the elevator, but it was one of the older OTIS models, and the noise the thing made as it came up to the fifth floor sounded like a construction drill when you had one side of your head still pressed against the pillow of your tiny single bed. The rest of the week, that elevator was a pain in the ass, waking me up at ungodly hours when all I wanted to do was sleep until the last fifteen minutes before class.
On Friday mornings, though, it was sweet. The sound would wake me up, maybe around 7:45am or so, and I'd scootch over towards the back of the wall and stay in that delirious in-between stage between waking and sleep. The light from the window for much of that year would be a pale grey-blue that spilled over everything - from my Gladiator poster on the wall that I bought at the last IMAGINUS sale to my desk and the Pentium desktop computer that now seems like Stone Age technology.
I'd hear that elevator - whirrr-r-r-r-r-rr-r-r-r-r-rr-r-r..br-o-o-o-mmmmmmmm! - come to a stop on our floor, and the doors open, and that's how I knew that I was only thirty seconds away from my ex coming through the door of the apartment-style dorm, then opening the door to my place. She'd have been up since like five o'clock, and would have driven in from Brampton, parked her car in Zone Six, and taken the shuttle here. She'd be tired, and she'd be ice cold, as girls tend to be in winter (and most seasons, I find). So she'd take off her coat and shoes and just hop into the space in the bed I just made for her, and I'd reflexively grab the comforter and envelope her in it and warm her up. Then we'd lay there for at least a good half-hour before our morning seminars, and all was right with the world. We were both 20 years old.
 |
| Main hallway...hell, I should be a rental agent! |
I should probably clarify at this juncture, people might read that and think that I'm pining for her - especially with Singles Awareness Day around the corner - but this is not the case. A couple of people I've met in the past month alone seem to think that when a relationship ends, you have to press "delete" on all those moments if you're to "move on". As I've written about time and time again on this blog, that does a disservice to the time you spent, and I have "moved on", while retaining what was good about the experience. And Friday mornings on the fifth floor of Bates Residence were almost all good. I'm looking forward to more such moments with the next girl who becomes special to me. Never mourn because it ended; smile because it happened.
In any case, that was a memorable time that, really, was truly mine, because that was my first home away from home. Every place since was shared with with my ex, except for the apartment I'm leaving now.
I don't regret the decision....well, not completely. The only hangups I have right now involve the loss of "independence" and my own issue with the idea that living with your parents at 30 years old may not make you the most attractive person to the kind of women I'm interested in dating. Mostly that last one (I have a car and will have a ton of gas money to go where I please over the next year, so I'm still "free").
Still, I'm not at home due to lack of ambition - hell, I only returned home to live once in the past ten years, and that was the summer of 2001 right after Bates - but out of sheer deliberation and choice to be closer to my family and clear up some debt. As I've written, most single women in my age group won't recognize these qualities until their late thirties or early forties. In quarter-life, too many of them want a guy who can give them money and toys, all flash and no substance, guys who satisfy those primal urges that women feel to want to feel protected and provided for. The elusive "spark". And because they tend to be just a bunch of grown-up boys at this point in life, these twentysomething guys burn them, so much so that some of these ladies create distant early warning systems to flag "issues" and "baggage" in potential mates, using any little violation - he has too many female friends, he lives at home, he watches South Park - to justify not pursuing someone who would otherwise be great for them.
Before I get too carried away, it'll take a while for me to get used to the idea that, for the right girl for me, it won't matter that I live at home at all, nor will any of my other perceived "weaknesses" that I think I have. It'll work when it's supposed to. We'll leave it at that.
 |
| A spring view from my balcony. |
"Home" really is something that we make up. Anthropologists and psychologists may say it's a primal instinct to be connected to a place, but tell that to a nomadic people, who never stay in the same place for too long. Tell that to a world traveler, backpacking for years around the globe, staying in hostels, hotels, campgrounds, even the street for little periods here and there before moving on. Some say it's people, but tell that to drifters and hitchers, to those on spiritual pilgrimages, all on their own and who may meet people on the road, experience whatever they have with them, then let them fall behind them on the road as they press on. In that way, I suppose one apartment that helped me rebuild and re-create myself in a very transformational year matters as much as my childhood home to which I'm now returning, and any other place I'll call "home" in the foreseeable future.
Just have to wait and see what happens, as I've been doing.
