Moving

I moved house. This is a positive development, as I do not live well alone. Sometimes I think that people who are content in their own company are a different species. They’re Orangutans, swinging calmly through the forests of Borneo, all wise eyes and slow grace, and I’m a bonobo, maniacally humping everything and organizing female solidarity groups to stop the males being dicks.

In the absence of other primates to hump or politically organize, I can find myself behaving strangely. How strangely, I hear you ask? I don’t know. What do you do when you’re alone? Do you eat your cereal in the bathroom so that you can look in the mirror and pretend you’re having breakfast with another human? It would probably be okay if you did.

On the upside, my relationship with my cat, Frida Katlo (pictured above in all her Stalinesque glory), has developed in new and meaningful ways. Because we used to talk, but we never used to really talk, you know?

Moving house is a terrible activity, but now that it’s done it’s pretty great to be somewhere new. Sadly, Frida doesn’t share this conviction, because, like all her kind, she hates change. Cats are the conservatives of the animal world. If it was up to cats there’d be no gay marriage. They’d be like, “Everything is perfect the way it is! No more weddings! No! People leave for days at a time when there are weddings and there are no feet to sleep on and I don’t like the catsitter and why do you and other mommy want to get married anyway when you already have a civil partnership and everything is fine and you don’t love me and what are you doing no don’t move the furniture DON’T MOVE THE FURNIIIIIIITURE.”

Oh catservatives – change is the only constant in life. Loosen up. Do a little catnip.

Now I’m living with a super cool woman called Colleen who also got her heart broken before Christmas and is also a writer and also spent much of the early part of 2017 going slightly squirrelly while viscerally experiencing the “apart” in a suddenly too large apartment. However, in Colleen’s case this might count as professional research, as she’s writing a book about squirrels.

I was worried at first that I was still too sad and weird to live with someone new, but Colleen has very forgiving standards. Like, on the first Saturday after I moved in I spent the day in my pyjamas writing a song about my Dad and gently weeping. Not exactly putting my best foot forward. Colleen came home, poured me a whiskey, pulled out her banjo, declared the chorus of my freshly minted misery tune catchy, then taught me the chords for her (amazing) version of R Kelly’s Ignition, which represented a much needed change of tempo for our impromptu jam session. She’s like a mail-order flatmate. Last week we had a “Moving In and Moving On” party, which was the best time I’ve had in months. Cause there ain’t no party like a heartbreak party.

In Montreal the snow is melting, shoots are labouring up, trying to smell the sunshine, trying to convince themselves to have a shower and leave the house; meanwhile, unimaginative writers are using the arrival of spring as a hackneyed metaphor for being over the worst of a pretty bad time and beginning to feel okay again. Some of them, too wanky and pretentious to authentically commit to an emotionally truthful if obvious metaphor without requisite postmodern irony, yet too uninspired to find something better, are using a meta mode to circumvent the literary judgement of others.

I am a beautiful fucking crocus. And I do feel better.