The ups and sounds of moving out

This past weekend, I moved back home after going at it on my own for the first time in my life in a little cottage in Observatory. A cottage with a cracked bedroom window, an overgrown garden, an extended family of snails, a slightly out-of-tune piano and an eerie picture of Whistler’s Mother on the dining room wall.

Yes, it’s only been a tad over three months, but due to unforeseen circumstances I need to find a new place and until that happens, my old and now painfully undersized bedroom will need to suffice.

I grew up with one of the ultimate fears being that, when I were to move out, moving back home (regardless of the reason) would simply be the ultimate failure. I don’t really want to go home at all. And yet, feeling as accepting and cognisant of my current circumstances feels like the greatest accomplishment I’ve had in some time, but more of that a bit later…

Going back to moving out of home for the first time, what are some of the biggest lessons I’ve picked up in the last few months? What is reality actually like? Well, right off the bat, there was the rather upsetting realisation that carrying boxes all day and acquainting yourself with your new home, while empowering, is not as easy and enjoyable as it would be if you were doing it with someone else. 

Once everything was somewhat set-up, there was the question of ‘what now’? It was truly peculiar to have the silence that was once a blessing (on the rare occasion I was home alone at my parents’ place) seem like something far more burdensome and unsettling here, in my own space. Being the youngest of four, I had always been accustomed to the ambient sounds of others milling about the house, banging pots and pans, locking bathroom doors, watching the TV too loudly or simply visiting the refrigerator at 3am to grab that last glass of hopelessly flat Coca-Cola.

I love silence, but certainly not as much I was getting in those first few weeks, and it soon became second-nature to turn the TV or my music just a little bit louder than I was used to, with even Brooke Logan's voice offering some audible comfort.

On your own, especially at night, there is the need to justify every single sound that you hear. If you can’t explain every sound, then the natural assumption is that you’re about to die. A spooky scraping on the roof? “Oh, that must be the leaves of that big palm tree blowing in the wind and scraping against my roof, which is made from that older tin-like material that also makes everything sound louder than it actually is.”

A sudden knocking noise from the kitchen? “Relax, Karl. It must be that big pot that you stacked on top of all those plates and the pot must suddenly have moved an inch because the greasiness of the plate below it made the entire structure unstable in the first place.”

What about the sound of the patio door being opened? “Holy shit! Someone just opened the patio door! This is where it all ends…”

I blame my parents for these bouts of anxiety. They have always been highly security-conscious and aware of their surroundings and evidently, much of those traits have been passed down to me. But these were times, especially over the first month, that I sorely missed the presence of someone else in the next room.

I learnt much more in these three months. I learnt how resourceful I could be when one simply has no other choice. I changed outside light bulbs (standing on a cushion that was on a chair which was balanced on a table) at 1am in the middle of the night. I unblocked drains (who knew you could do this without a hosepipe and/or a plumber?).

I went on a gardening frenzy one day with a shears borrowed from a friend, and came away with all my limbs intact. I picked figs, removed a gigantic arthropod from the wall without screaming and mopped up some barf (not my own) from the single house party I had (not my plan).

And then there was the cooking… the positives include me never having made something that wasn’t edible. My onion-chopping speed has also improved from nothing to one onion per 90 seconds. I learnt the hard way that tomato sauce is not the answer should one run out of tomato paste, and that what looks like too many mushrooms at the beginning of the cooking process turns into far too few by the end.

I loved washing dishes whenever I felt like and I loved being able to sing in the shower without someone hearing me on the other side of the door.

More than all of that, it’s eye-opening to do something right (cook a good meal, have the grass cut, pay the rent) and to realize that you did it all by yourself. You’re forced to grow a thicker skin and to not sweat the small stuff and as I hinted at above, it’s been that sense of growth that means I can go back home for the month of November knowing that at the end of the day, this is life. Things don’t go entirely according to plan, and that is absolutely fine (if rather inconvenient).

I hope to find a place I can call home again really soon because it’s a tough, awkward, expensive and wildly life-changing experience that I can’t wait to resume (hopefully in a place without a large palm tree's noisy leaves imitating the arrival of an axe-wielding intruder...).