Yesterday I moved out of my apartment. My apartment saga has been something of a character in my life in Paris, so it seems necessary to mention that here.
I am actually a little sorry — regardless of what my last post says — for all of the introspective endings and beginnings and life in transition crap that is currently filling my sporadic posts to this blog. Maybe you don’t care, but I have this feeling that my future self is going to be so annoyed with me when she looks back on this.
I find myself deferring to the assumed opinion of my future self a lot. I have said and done a lot of things that I find annoying as hell, so I often take this into consideration when I say or do something that I suspect I will have to account for later. The internet exacerbates this problem. It’s all in there, right down to diary entries from my middle school self, if one knows where to look. It’s eerie, and it makes everything that I do stressful because I know that I have to contend with my future self’s opinion of my present self.
I’m getting sidetracked. Back to the introspective endings and beginnings life in transition stuff.
The night before I moved out I was going to have friends over to eat and drink in my courtyard, but the rain turned “friends” into “friend.” We drank way too much and ate buttery food and lost track of time and it was fun and grand and whatever. I had done most of my packing that day and so this friend asked me if it felt weird to be moving out of that apartment.
I don’t actually remember how I answered her question because I have an annoying habit of saying things just to have something to say, regardless of whether or not I’ve really thought about that thing or will continue to mean it later (also related to my archived-self struggles). I do know that the answer, at the time, was that it was not all that weird.
It still isn’t. It doesn’t seem to carry with it the sense of finality that I would have expected it to.
I am currently staying at a friend’s apartment while he is out of town, and he is letting me store my things here while I am in Morocco. Today, as I was walking back to his apartment, I did have this brief moment of, “Oh, right, I don’t live there now,” as I headed toward my now former apartment.
But it’s hard to feel any great sense that one thing has ended when no new thing has begun in its place. I am just in this weird floating transitional space and I don’t entirely know what’s going on, and I kind of like it that way.
OK, no, I did not like the actual moving out business. It took me about eight or nine hauls to get all of my stuff over to his apartment. While it is only about four blocks away, I also had to get all of that stuff up six flights of narrow, windy French stairs.
Otherwise, though, I’m all right with it. I am all right with the ambiguous answers to the question, “Where will I sleep each night,” for the entire month of June. It’ll work out. One way or another, it’ll work out.
I go from this apartment to a hotel to a family home in Morocco for two and a half weeks. Then I’ll return to France and spend a week with visiting family, before moving into my third and final Parisian apartment for a month.
I have about two months left before I return to the US. There is no “for good” on that either, but it certainly gets a “for the forseeable future” tacked onto the end. I’m not all that worried about missing my little apartment and its futon and itty bitty toaster oven. I loved and appreciated it when it was home, but now it’s not. I have bigger things to worry about.
Like the fact that my imagined conversations with my future self are probably a sign of some sort of serious psychological problem for which I should be seeking help and/or treatment. Or the fact that running errands now involves SO. MANY. STAIRS. and there are not even words for the amount of pain my entire body is in right now.
Serious life issues, you see.