Packed

So, I've spent two weeks packing and saying my farewells and sorting out final things to do with this beautiful flat where I've been able to spend the first half of 2011, and all the while, I consciously think, I am so calm. I'm moving coast to coast, and it isn't bothering me at all.

Today I threw out the last of the trash. Waited for the on-time arrival of the removalists. Signed away my 20 boxes-and-parcels in faith that we'll meet again, me and the compactly organised, compulsively inventoried sum of my worldly possessions (in this country, anyway). Ate a quiche; ate a cake. Did some vacuuming. Put out some things for Freecyclers to collect at the pre-arranged time. Went for tea with a friend and her two very bright, entertainingly tangential children. Came home. Walked out again for dinner. Came home.

And it hit me all at once, what I've been trying to tell myself for weeks.

I'm leaving.

I really am.

I don't know when I'll come back here. I know I will, but it's all hazy and abstract, and it's unsettling that the place that's been my very concrete reality for three and a half years is soon going to be just another place in that miniature world in my head, in that part of me that stores the essence of eateries well loved and places that held my blood and secret bookshops that none of my friends know and benches in Hyde Park near the guitar busker where the shade never leaves you and the pavilion in that little waterfront park in Glebe where you're bound to get ambushed by a joyous dog on every visit and... and this post is running too long for someone so short on sleep.

So. I'm leaving. That's pretty huge, considering everything that's happened here.

But on the other end of this journey, I'm arriving.

That's even huger.