Now I think I get it in a way that I may have not understood before.
Money, I mean.
Batman had a team of trusted people come in and work to unpack all of our things last night, working until the house was ready. They used photographs and instructions and common sense and they got everything right.
It was more than a little surreal to come in this morning and find my power cord on the desk, plugged in just waiting for my laptop. To open the drawer in our bathroom and find that stupid box of dental tape that I hate because it cuts my gums still in the plastic organizer box, same as it used to be in the house on the point. My favorite lipgloss? Sitting on the counter beside my wooden hairbrush. Where it always is.
In the living room I noticed the wooden articulated figures we use for life drawings still in their obscene positions together. I walk over to the stereo and press play and the CD is still Footloose (1984, not the new one. Geez). Mike Reno is singing. I had taken that CD out and put it away, but it was in the stereo when they did their inventories so here it is back in the player now.
I open the fridge. It's stocked with everything I buy, even though we did a magnificent job at using up all the perishables and giving the rest to Daniel to finish up, since we were the first ones to go.
I couldn't be the last. I just couldn't.
I didn't expect the move to be this painless. Is this how people live? I don't live like this. I rent rickety, questionably-safe U-Hauls and I sign contracts I don't understand and I hope for the best and am always surprised in the end. Always. I go into debt for things that should cost less and I sell the small remaining fragments of my soul to the Devil for the rest and I'm suddenly not supposed to do that anymore but I don't see how that's going to work.
But I really like this new house.
It's smaller, more inviting. The lights glow in warm yellow tones at night and the woods are dark and lovely and peaceful all the way around. There's no wind. There's a driveway and space for two vehicles. There are four bedrooms, as I told you before and at my request the fourth one was made up for when Duncan and Dalton come back. They'll stay here with us for a few weeks while they find a new place. Everyone else is organized but they are flexible enough to want to wait until they are back in the province to look in person. I can't blame them for that. And the added people around me will make this transition a tiny bit gentler and less abrupt.
It helps. I'm a little fish out of water otherwise. I really don't like change and this one was slow and steady overall and the least difficult of every one so far.
The kids like the house. They like their rooms. They like that they can bike on the road. They like the promise of the deep dark woods and they like the idea that they will have to answer to three adults instead of twelve, most of the time.
Ben likes the house. He's very big in it, ducking through standard doorways, taking up huge amounts of room. It's like things were in the castle, only those rooms were smaller still. Lochlan is himself here, relaxed and calm. Certain, somehow as if he is the fortune teller instead of the woman with the skirts I spent so much time with on the road, as she sometimes babysat me for a sixth of Lochlan's pay. He says things will be just fine. She never said that. She warned me that I had a face that would ruin all those who gazed upon it. She called me Medusa. She swore at me in a language I didn't understand and she refused to ever do my reading again.
Now I get sandwich-hugs more than a few times from my loves, both of them surrounding me with their arms. Three musketeers now for real. No help, no backup, no distractions. Just one big fuckup, one little fuckup and a dreamer who can't clear his head long enough to see grey, instead seeing black and white, putting rules to all anomalies until things run straight again without surprise, and then he works to maintain that total control with a huge helping of magic, fireworks, wonderment and ridiculousness on the side.
Yeah, we'll be okay.
And there's cake. Which we didn't have but they left one anyway. :)
