The Time Between
The first couple of months after the cancellation of flights and lodgings hit me hard. I couldn’t think about it all without getting rather depressed so I just worked and binged on Netflix. When June 1st came and went I was very sad — that was my original arrival date, a little homage to the date my family (Mom, Dad, and I) left our home in Poland when I was a kid. I felt it would be fitting to arrive back in Europe on the same date: the new home-away-from-home but now in Spain. Alas, it was not meant to be though I did take the day off work just in case I’d be too grumpy to work. From now on I had a new date to look forward to: August 30th.
The three months before departure flew by. With the pandemic hanging over our heads we still managed to put together a lovely wedding, and, perhaps not as successfully, the packing up of the house. All I will say about the latter is that I will try very hard to forget the whole experience and hope that my family will forgive me the hell I left behind. In my defence, I was clearly much too old to do this shit by myself, as much as I try to tell myself I am not old.
I’m actually quite proud of myself in that I was able to say good-bye to a lot of my belongings and not really feel anything. It was rather freeing to sell, give, or throw away stuff and I threw away a lot of stuff. I always thought moving was a great way to free oneself of encumbrances that accumulate over the years, and I had at least 9 years’ worth of such, the longest ever for me. And now the 35 boxes of books and another 20+ boxes and 10 bins of various household and personal items are all that remain. It’s amazing how little one needs to make one happy (yes, I know 35 boxes of books is a lot … bite me).
In addition to packing, I spent a lot of time worrying about the state of the world: COVID-19 cases going up again in Spain and elsewhere, the possibility of flights being cancelled, cities and countries introducing new measures and maybe even shutting down for quarantine again, and, of course, all this while trying to pass on the torch at work. To say I’d bitten off more than I could chew isn’t wrong.
