Moving On (Moving Out)
I am scared of empty rooms.
I’ve never moved house.
There were periods of rental, at an age too long ago to recall, but the house I was taken from the hospital, back in 2004, to remains the place I go ‘home’ to today.
The first place I lived independently from that, in 2023, was student halls - a sickening blend of hotel and boarding school that made my skin shiver, more panopticon than home. There had never been a short cul-de-sac, a nondescript face of windows-and-a-door I could point to and say-
Hey, I lived there once!
I mention all this to emphasise that a lot went into the moment when I placed the keys to my second year university house on the side cabinet, and shut the door behind me.
From the moment I signed that house - way back in January 2024 - I had dreaded that moment. I’m cursed with a particular sense of sentimentality that I felt wouldn’t be suited to the fast turnover months spent in a rented 5 bed home.
(I think of the time when I was six years old, and my Mam, briefly, put the house up for sale. How I ran through my room, desperately etching my name on the walls and furniture, hoping it would stop them taking it from me. It seems nonsensical now - but the house never did sell).
I feared before even packing up my fire-doored cupboard-of-a-room in the college accommodation, the feeling that would come with leaving my first independent home. The conflicted emotion of walking past it on my route to the library, feeling someone else rest there.
Yet, when the time came (yesterday). I felt nothing.
Well, actually that’s a lie. I felt a lot.
I felt joy, and excitement, and I daresay a small piece of hope. Mostly though, I felt a bone crushing relief.
While shoving the final item into the back of my Dad’s car (a wine-stained rug, rolled into a log since the night of my 21st), my parents offered to take a photo of me standing outside the door.
Why, (I declared), Would I want to do that?
Maybe my response was one more fitting if they had asked me to strip naked and light my hair on fire, but in my defence, that’s something I would have much rather done.
As it was, I pictured it as the most bitter before-and-after I could possibly have. Me, last July, (seemingly) able-bodied, employed, hopeful, wanted. Flashing to me now, leant on a crutch, broke and unemployed, and feeling like a little woodlouse, curled into a ball to avoid any further crushes. It wasn’t the trajectory life was supposed to take, it was all backwards and rushed and sloppy and mistaken.
And maybe I felt relief leaving the house, but packing up my room was a certain kind of torture. I started optimistically - thinking of how I could map my layout into my accommodation next year (a ground floor room, with a too-expensive bathroom). But, somewhere around tipping my collection of Pat Barker novels in my suitcase, the experience soured.
Last time you saw these shelves empty, you could walk unassisted! The unwanted little voice in my head cackled.
It was unhelpful, but crucially, not wrong. As I stood on my toes, reaching for a trinket pushed to the back of a shelf (a packaged Dark Willow Buffy the Vampire Slayer funko-pop, if you must know), I came to the realisation that the last time I had held that item was probably pre-incident. As I came to this conclusion, I must have destabilised the careful jenga-like structure of my sentimentality, and the medal from the charity 10k I did (T minus one month) came crashing onto my head. As I picked it up and held it, I cast a glance to my rosary-
Now, was that really necessary?
I’m a twenty-something at university. I am a twenty-something. Life now is about pushing forward, carving a path for myself. Everyone knows your second summer of university should be about solo-travelling the globe, or putting in the hours at an internship set to catapult you into at least a £30,000 graduate salary.
Well, you say, university isn’t everything!
True, I know plenty of people my age settling down, having babies. Getting married, putting a deposit on a new-build house. But what did I have to show for it?
Stood there, in the blank canvas of the wasted potential of a room - what did I have to show for myself? Scraping through minimal contact hours, blacking out over 3,000 word assignments, writing in the middle of the night to a (mostly anonymous) platform. It’s easy to not realise you’ve stagnated (or in my case, regressed), until you’re packing up with nothing to show for yourself.
Oh God, I thought.
I’ve failed.
The nature of these homes is clear, they have year long tenancies, crammed to the hilt with young adults slowly becoming sick of the sight of each other. The turnover of people-like-me is immense, and suddenly I felt like I was choking on the shadows of all the people who’ve lived here before and the idea of those who’ll come after (because really, what’s the difference?). I thought of the girl with her makeup scattered along the desk, wires on the floor, postcards stamped onto the wall. The one who was spooked at our viewing arrival, way back when.
What indentations had she made on this mattress? Which scratches on the desk were hers? What was spilt on the carpet that she had panicked to get free, days before I naively stumbled through. When had these walls seen her unfurl her wings - what heights did they push her from the windows and in to?
When I laid on that bed, what ghosts lay next to me?
(I suddenly was so grateful for the expanse of my childhood room. It had room for all the little-me’s of before).
Yes, this house had seen some good times. It had heard the screech of laughter, of drunken karaoke, the small victory of a scraped first class grade. It had seen the mistakes that I was somehow still, a little, proud of. The nights I came back a little too-out of my mind, the failure to change before falling into bed. It was the setting to the stories I tell a little too loudly over coffee, framing the comedy-of-errors in my lightest light. It saw something, that’s for sure.
But it also saw me wheeled in by patient transport, while my friends played beer-pong. It saw me tumble down stairs, and not eat through sheer exhaustion. Worst of all, it saw nothing, in the weeks where I was too unwell to even be there.
I never knew you could disappoint brick and plaster. I never knew it could feel betrayed.
I wanted to leave a little note, shoved behind the chest of drawers. I wanted to leave a well-wish to whoever comes here next. But when the moment came, I just wanted to let it all go.
When I placed my key, and drove away. I didn’t look back.
So now, when I walk to the library, there’s a place I can point to.
Hey! I lived there once!
Somehow, I don’t think I will.
this is amazing!