Up until the time I went off to university, I had never moved house. My parents have lived in the same lovely little brick house for twenty-something years. The same lovely little house they bought when they were first married. That considered, I’ve only had to pick up my life and shift everything on a few occasions. Last month was one.
Nearly every time I’ve gone through this process it’s been sheer chaos. A frenzy of boxes and a rush to just get out of the old and into the new. Maybe even just a suitcase or two thrown into the cargo hold of a transatlantic flight.
This move was similar to the others. Days of preparations and yet still feeling like I was keeping my head barely above the surface of the breaking waves. Though thankfully we’re all out of our old house and into a nicer, friendlier house in a much greener and safer area of the city.
I now find myself tasked with constructing a new nest for myself to hibernate in over the course of my final year at university.
This house will see graduations and postgraduate program applications. It will see draft after draft of dissertations. It will be drowned in tea and coffee and tears. A baptism of boiling water.
This house is my last promised home in Britain. It needs to be a good one, and as I unpack boxes and slot books onto shelves, it’s hard to shake off the feeling perched on my shoulder that I’ll be doing it all again before I know it.
It’s the hard truth of being a student. Learning to love where you are, but then accepting, in the same breath, that it won’t stay this way for long. Your course progresses, friends move on, life comes and sweeps you off your feet. It’s choppy waters to negotiate on a good day, throw in any sort of mental health issue and suddenly you’re heaping pails of water out of a leaking sailboat.
That’s okay. I like my metaphorical sailboats with a bit of extra work.
seven hills 