[NOTE: I WILL UPDATE THIS POST WITH PHOTOS WHEN I CAN GET AT 'EM. UNTIL THEN, YOU JUST HAVE TO READ STUFF. READ IT WELL.]
I've done it. Move complete. I'm typing this away in a Second Cup in Montreal.
The night before the big move, I could only lay awake in bed and think one thing: "This is the craziest thing I've ever done." And it is. I've never lived so far from home, in a place where I don't fluently speak the preferred language. I'm pouring literally thousands of dollars into a degree and this living arrangement for the next three years. They say the big risks = the biggest payoffs.
Fingers crossed on that.
The move itself went something like this: we got up with the sunrise to jam poor Telly into his cat carrier, then schlepped him into the back of Bek's car. Bek and I took that car, and our parents each went in their own respective vehicles. We had a gaddamn convoy. Before we left, we geared up on coffee and breakfast sandwiches, then took off down the highway. And we drove over 500KM, over 6 hours, until we made it all the way to la belle province (Québec) and la ville (Montreal...duh). The drive itself didn' feel long at the finish, but by the end I was talking to the cat, he was talking back, and no one was in the mood for the next step of the journey.
I had been dreading this for weeks. Steady goodbyes, one by one to the people I love as well as the slow disappearance of my worldly belongings into bags and cardboard boxes were pretty much symptoms of the looming apocalypse. Friends and family with their eyes alight would ask me if I was excited and I would just shake my head.
"No. I'm too stressed out by the move."
The idea of moving is simple by definition, and most people only hate it because of the hard work it signifies. You take your stuff from the home at point A, move it to point B. Well, it so happens that Point B, my new home, is an apartment graced with ample stair-age. No elevator.
My parents are both over 50 years old, not spring chickens and the very IDEA of sending them (cruel taskmaster styles, yo) up not one, but two narrow, somewhat steep flights of stairs carrying heavy/fragile/featherlight/nothing was giving me massive anxiety. If someone broke something, I was going to have THAT on my conscience for the next...oh...forever.
Every family dinner or special occasion, someone would say, "Hey, do you remember the time you got the idiot idea to move to the only French speaking province in our country and mom was carrying that big box up the Aztec pyramid that you call your stairs using only her love for you and she slipped and got a hangnail?" Dare I say, the story of the agony would echo through the ages as first fact, and then legend.
Yes. This is the MO I was working with. Dreading. When we GOT there, the former tenants of our place were still moving out. They were pretty well all francophones, which one of the fellows seemed to find important as he made a big show out of asking us all if we were from Ontario and then bidding us goodbye as "anglophones." Merci, bro. Nothing makes me feel at home like having it pointed out explicitly why I don't fit in. Seriously!
As we hauled box after box up the stairs, my dad stood on the balcony and pulled things up by a rope. My parents in the end, actually did very little stair climbing, for which I am very grateful. We got all the stuff up, threw it into the rooms, shutting Telly in the bathroom, to adjust to part of his new home. He curled up in the window, petrified. I could sympathize.
My parents headed to Ikea to bed hunt (which is like head hunting but sleepier in the back to school season) and Bek's parents went to scope out their hotel. What did we do in that moment? Did we jump up and down with excitement? Did we high five? No. We threw my comforter on the floor and laid on it without moving. Then we made coffee and laid still some more. The start of our glamorous French-Canadian Metropolitan lives began with no sugar, no milk dark roast and paralysis courtesy of fatigue.
We went out for dinner with Bek's parents, tried to order in French, and came home to find the cat missing. POOF. Gone. We searched the apartment top to bottom. We checked every room, every pile of miscellaneous stuff, every box, twice. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I feared that in some WEIRD anglo-hate fueled terrorist act, someone had had broken in to let the cat out. We literally could not find him. ANYWHERE. So I did what my mama taught him to do best: come to the sound of a treat container being shaken. Following the sound of the bell on his collar, Bek found him in my closet. Which we thought was regular size, but ACTUALLY goes all the way back to Narnia, while still providing room for several fugitives and/or in denial people of the gay persuasion.
We have no beds, so we slept on the floor. C'est la vie.
None of this even feels real yet. Like by next week, I'll be back home, in my Waterloo life with my family and everything will be on hold again. Not this time, mes amis. This time, we're playing for keeps.
À Suivre...
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