The Most Stressful Move Ever
This was worse than that Saturday the 31st when U-Haul didn't have the truck I reserved six weeks before. This was worse than the time I had to clear a garage full of personal belongings through the rain. It was even worse than any of the overseas moves I've done. And it wasn't even my move!
I knew that sinboy and rosefox wouldn't be out by the time they said they would-nobody ever is, and I'm impressed that the truck was rolling by 1:30pm. And we'd agreed that we'd share the cost of bdot cleaning their rooms, so I was prepared for a fair bit of crap to be left behind. I just wasn't prepared for the sheer volume of it... or what was in it!
"I don't want anything that's left in my room," he said, and he welcomed me to pick out anything I wanted, and just throw the rest out.
Pick out anything I wanted. Heh. That's really funny. Some of it was stuff that belonged to me and hadn't been returned, and it was buried deep in boxes of other stuff. Stuff like household bills that he never gave to me, and stamped envelopes I'd given him to mail, containing cheques that I had to cancel because utility companies complained that they never received them. The missing text book belonging to bdot's daughter's school was there, too, along with various gifts I'd bought for him over the years which obviously weren't very important to him.
"It's just stuff," I've heard him say a few times in recent months. In some ways, he's right. I carry a lot of clutter around and it makes it harder to move. But I really do use most of it, materials for rallies and stuff for
Burning Man. To tell you the truth, his gleeful references to the old papa-sun I meant to turn into something for the Burn got old a while ago, and frankly, it's my stuff, so it's my call, and I actually take responsibility for dealing with it!
And some stuff isn't just stuff. How can you leave your own fucking wedding portraits in a pile of crap like that?! Yes, your marriage has broken down, and it might not even be entirely your own fault. But don't bloody pretend that it wasn't one of the best things that ever happened to you!!
He left his mortarboard behind, too, along with various certificates. It wouldn't surprise me if his diplomas were among the paperwork we had to throw out. The guy has more qualifications than I, yet he was giving me flack when the start-up I was working for wasn't paying, even though I was working a courier job as well and bringing in more than he was.
It was weird to emerge into common areas this morning, and notice that I was not bracing myself for possibly seeing him. I thought the hardest thing about the living situation over the last few months was having to watch his marriage with hopeforyou break down. It probably was, actually-I cried hysterically when I stopped to look at the wedding portraits-but I was also having a really hard time with him personally, and I didn't even realise it!
I was aware that the snarkiness and lack of responsibility was pissing me off, and I thought I was dealing with it okay. I called him on the worst of it, like the fact that I was finding my mail all over the house like easter eggs, and honestly, I cut him several kilometres of slack. I knew he was having a rough time: his marriage was ending, he was depressed and only just adjusting to the meds, many of his friends had lost patience with him, he was moving to the other side of the country, and he lived in the same troubled household that I did. But only this morning, when I walked into the living room and knew I didn't have to worry about seeing him and his cloud wander by, did I realise how passive-aggressive he'd been all this time, and what a toll that had taken on me.
I recognise that I might not be being entirely fair to him in this entry. I realise that this is a hard situation for all of us, and that all the reasons I resisted flaming him in my journal earlier are just as valid now, just like all the times I resisted screaming at him. I recognise that there's a lot of
M shit going on here too, not to mention the stress of having to sort through all those boxes to get them out of the way of canis_fortuna, who's moving in today. (I'm only two-thirds of the way through-I threw the remainder into my own bedroom last night, to get it out of the way for hopeforyou's rebirthing ritual.) The scariest thing is that I think I can imagine getting so depressed that other people's well-being falls by the wayside as much as my own. It happens often enough; last week, in this very state, eleven people were killed when the train they were on derailed after striking a ute-the driver had lost it even more than sinboy, and left it across the rails. And honestly, I wish him well-I'm not sure if the thing with rosefox will work and I'm sceptical about the whole bookshop idea, but if it works out, I'll be happy for him, because for years I've been paining to see him find his calling in life, and just be happy!
But for now I'm just going to let myself be pissed off, and question the rationality later. Referring to him as the Seventh Deadly Sinboy may be puerile, but it makes it easier to sort through the remaining shit, and I think everybody wins from that.