The boxes you brought here and never unpacked are still patiently waiting to go

[eye_of_a_cat]

The crack in my bedroom ceiling had spread this morning. Most of the way across the room, then a sharp right turn, then into the outside wall. I'm too high up to be able to see whether it's showing up in the brickwork or not, but I'm not sure I'd look even if I wasn't. So I slept on the sofa last night, and I'll keep sleeping on the sofa, where I was lying awake in the dark, laughing about it. I've held on to my singleness with a talon-like grip, I get jittery weird if I even share a bed on a regular enough basis to have my own side, I'm in my own place all by myself, and... here I am, sleeping on the sofa anyway. Yes, I can indeed start a fight in an empty room! Cower before my, er, skill.

And it's occurred to me since then that if I was nineteen I would be writing a poem about this. Two or three places in ten years? Well, people move. Four or five? That's bad luck, maybe, but these things happen. But eleven, as I've had? Much though I might bitch and whine about moving, and much though I could give you a good reason for every single one of those moves, I can't even try to pretend that hitting eleven doesn't have something to do with me, for better or worse.

So if I was nineteen, I'd be writing a poem about watching the crack in my bedroom ceiling. And about how my landlord, who should be far more worried than he is, never wanted to investigate properly because then he'd have to  put all his energies into shoring things up and warning future buyers. And about how the whole thing is going to fall down at some point, in some huge shower of plaster and rafters, and about how it doesn't have to be my crisis, because it isn't my house. I'm just living here; I'll shake off the plaster dust when I go. And yet, the cracks in the ceiling come from the same roots as the warped, uneven floors, the same ones I'd have seen as a warning if I wanted to buy, but saw as a feature I loved because I didn't. So that would have been the poem I wrote, back when I didn't think metaphors needed to be subtle.

Comments

[countrycousin.livejournal.com]

Part of it is just being young and a student. I was thirty before I accumulated more years than past addresses because I moved a lot when young, too. Now I've had only three in the past 37 years. (OK, four - they changed the street number for my current place.)

[elettaria.livejournal.com]

Agreed. I moved annually or more often all the way up until I got this flat (which I own) and proceeded to hang on for grim life. Really, it's normal. Most people have their studentdom over in three or four years, which is why they stop doing it earlier.

I think the idea of writing an angsty poem about the crack in the ceiling is hilarious, myself. Right now you need someone in to check that the place is safe to inhabit, probably within the next 24 hours.

[eye-of-a-cat.livejournal.com]

Well, it wouldn't exactly be a poem about the ceiling, as such...

Agreed that most people do a lot of moving around in 3/4 years at university, but I think a lot of that has to do with being young (and non-employed), as well - by early-20s, most of the full-time students I know had had it with moving and got themselves into a position where they could settle down on a somewhat-closer-to-long-term basis. Among my PhD students friends, I'm enough of a transient exception to have got a lot of jokes about spending two years or so in the last place - "Wow, for you, that's practically the equivalent of getting your name on the mortgage!"

[bike4fish.livejournal.com]

I got the moving out of the way when I was young - 21 moves by the time I was 18. I have moved 5 times in the last 14 years - twice because the landlord was selling, and once because the landlord sold his other house and moved in where I was living.

[eye-of-a-cat.livejournal.com]

twice because the landlord was selling, and once because the landlord sold his other house and moved in where I was living.

You know? I think about half the Why Renting Sucks rants ever made can be summarised in half-sentences such as this.

[vettecat.livejournal.com]

Yesterday upon the stair, I saw a crack that wasn't there... um, never mind...