On the move…

I’m moving house again. I am currently sitting here with my laptop, listening to Elgar, whilst everything is in cardboard boxes around me. This place that has been my first new home in a new city will be moving out of my life very soon and I go across the other side of town to live in a “real” house, albeit a rented one.

I’ll have to learn my way around another bit of this little city, which will no doubt cause me a fair bit of consternation over the next couple of weeks as, like most women (it would seem), my sense of direction is not brilliant.

In the last 24 hours, home has suddenly ceased to be home and is just a place again. I wonder how long it will take for the new house to feel like a home. According to research, it is supposed to take three weeks, but this place felt familiar after only a few days. When I moved off the boat, it had just started to feel like home, but felt distinctly lonely when I last went to visit her, the poor old girl.

There is now so much to do over the next few days. I only really started to get my head around it last night when I realised that I hadn’t absorbed many of the logistics of it at all. So now I have a list to help me blunder my way through.

I wonder if I will sleep any better in the new house; it certainly hasn’t come easy to me here and I wonder whether this is the source of some of the depressive thoughts that have been haunting me. This is a real irritation to me; I so want to sleep peacefully, like you, who go to sleep so readily with your head resting on my shoulder, or with a hand curled around mine, or lain protectively over my leg.

You sleep within seconds most of the time and I marvel at it; I bring peace to you, even if I can’t find it myself. Sometimes I watch you, stretched out and utterly feline, an arm cast over your head, your eyelashes brushing against your cheek and the line of soft hair on your stomach black in the half-darkness, creating pictures I wish I had the skill to photograph.
Sleep now has Fletcher’s* shades for you, who used to lie awake at night pondering your lot, but amongst your sweet peacefulness I need to find my own. I’m tired tonight, maybe I can curl up with you and drift into a comfortable one that will indeed beguile all my fancies.

*Sleep, by John Fletcher, 1579-1625