It’s 1:28 a.m. You can hear all 3 clocks in the apartment tick. The reset button is going to be hit soon and the alarm will sound, but this time you don’t have enough time this time. F***. Your relationship with the reset button wasn’t always like this. It used to be a refresh instead of a hard reboot.
You are better off now than you were then. This is fact, even if you haven’t had a legal amount of sleep in days. Moving 12 times in 5 years is what your adventures have amounted to. You get an email that indicates that you are in your homestretch now: your class is going on the IRS countdown clock come winter. All of a sudden you are flooded with signs that your days are numbered.
Apparently this ride is going to be over soon. Just like when going that last hill of a roller coaster ride and you see the operator and a line of people that are waiting to get on. While you’ve spent the past few years screaming, you ask yourself if you should be basking in some kind of glory. Unlike a rollercoaster, you’ve been on this ride for years. Time has hardened you, but now you second guess some of your active loathing. But then you don’t. Tough times have taught you things though. You think of all the friendships that would never have happened if you hadn’t shared the same quicksand.
There is an art to the restart. There is a newness that comes from buying furniture on Kijiji and finding housing on short notice. Meeting up with a friend for a meal last minute in a city you are only in for the night isn’t too much of a stretch of the imagination. You hope their number hasn’t changed as often as yours has.
There is beauty in transience. Friendships go from new, to newly old. Goodbye and hello are what you know. Less is more: packing the contents of your life in six hour or less isn’t unheard of in your circle. Belongings change hands but memories are there for as long as you need them. They compensate for the chaos. You’d have thought we’d be masters of this life by now.
You wonder how everyone else does it- this dark art, staying. How did they do it? Most attempts left you with a sour aftertaste. At least you can blame change on the grand calendar, but that doesn’t justify people drifting, cities changing, restaurants closing, and your favourite colleagues moving on to new and delightful positions. These are the curses of lingering too long.
Settling down, that’s something that even if you think about seems like something that happens to other people. But you have to admit that you have a few homebody tendencies: staying in can be appealing considering you can now afford a legitimate Netflix account and premium ice cream. That said you still get a kick out of getting a good deal at the grocery store. You are living in the better side of town now, your roommate is nice and you have patterns. You’ve learned the names of the people you work with and you see your name and extension on a staff list. You don’t let that go to your head because you know that your replacement already exists- a doppelganger that you won’t meet. Life is going to go on when you hand in your ID.
Even though it seems to always be new by now you know it isn’t really in some ways. The front desk assistant may have a different name; your extension may be a different set of four digits- you have to look yourself up in Outlook or check your email signature to find it. Perhaps you’ve hit that point where there isn’t one place to call home. No matter where you are, you are going to be missing someone or some get together. That’s alright though, time can be made. Impressive distances can be travelled.
Perhaps happily ever after will be knowing when to stay and when to go. It will be figuring out how not to be a workaholic. It will be knowing when to chase something and when to cut your losses. It will be long drives and short conversations. It will be apologizing, getting up at odd hours, and assembling IKEA furniture. It will be fantastic to have control of the reset button.
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