On Thursday, just before dawn, Rachelle and I began to move from our wonderful apartment in The Annex, to a work-in-progress place on Queen Street East. We absolutely loved our home on Madison, and our time there, and it’s been with some ambivalence that we decided to leave.
Allowing melancholy to wash over me, I sat on a folding chair in our living room, looking at the now bare walls and the piles of boxes that lay stacked around me, as I waited for the movers to arrive. In short order, Errol Mercury and his man appeared and began to transport all of our belongings into a white, graffiti-streaked van.
It was a simultaneously awesome and demoralizing thing to witness. Swiftly and without a trace of sentiment, they condensed the material proof our lives into the neat cube waiting out on the street.
Somehow, this seemed insufficient.
I wanted our lives to be more than that. I wanted those dull, brown boxes to rip open and sprout flowers. I wanted sound and light, I wanted astonished movers to smile, tenderly asking me to describe each item that they were moving.
But this didn’t happen.
We were exactly like the thousands and thousands of other people also moving that day, all filled with mixed emotions, all wondering what life would be like tomorrow.