Thursday, September 6, 2012

Off Topic (OT) - The Big Move

Editor's Note: Most of the entries here deal with the LGBT community and the issues that affect us as a group.  However, from time to time Adam and I will want to share things from our personal lives.

For those of you that know us personally, this is old hat to you.  For those that don't - we moved from New York (technically Maryland to New York first for Adam) to Washington state.

About six months ago, while we were on a mini-vacation in Anaheim ironically, Adam got a job offer with a company in Redmond, Washington.  The job (and the money) were too good to pass up, and both of us had only heard good things about the Pacific Northwest.  (Seriously, try to find someone that badmouths Seattle (mentioning rain doesn't count.))

It was bizarre, depressing, and mentally taxing.  Not so much the prospect of leaving a state I'd lived in all my life, but the amount of time in which I knew I was leaving.  I hate long goodbyes, and six months is an eternity.  It didn't help that some people treated it like I was dying, not relocating myself.  I don't like inspiring feelings of misery in the people I love.

By the time the days in which we had to actively prepare for moving came, I was a mess.  I just wanted to be here already, to skip the goodbye so I could look forward to again saying hello.  Luckily the tasks needing completion were many and complicated so I was kept occupied.

Moving day was a clusterfuck.  Adam had brought his stuff from his parents' house in Maryland and piled it around my parents' house.  I needed to disassemble around 100 Lego sets and take probably 100 things off my walls for the packers, which took the better part of last Monday.  After around 4 hours of sleep, the packers arrived at 9:15.  It took them a little under four hours to box everything and get it on the truck, during which we also had to meet with the dog shipper (for my dog only (11:00)), the specialized TV packers (10:00), and the car movers (11:00).

When everything wrapped up at 1:00 in the afternoon we were exhausted and had a half a day to kill before getting up the following morning at 3:30 to get to the airport three hours early so we could take care of the particulars for shipping Adam's dog.  I wasn't as depressed about my horrifically empty room as I thought I'd be even though it's the kind of thing that makes you realize that you're leaving a phase of your life for good.  Perhaps I was emotionally spent at that point, or perhaps I'm just overly cognizant that the only constant in life is that there are no constant.  As Maude said, "here today, gone tomorrow, so don't get too attached to things."

Luckily it was a quick sprint until the time when we had to leave.  I was able to say goodbye to some of my friends and get a few hours sleep.  That's another thing that never bothered me much, leaving people behind.  There are definitely people I will miss, but at the same time communication is so easy now, and it's communication that I value, not a person's physical presence.  The flights were flights, mildly uncomfortable and relatively mundane.  I slept for most of them.  We were able to see the dogs get loaded on, which was nice.

I think I watch too many movies.  When making as major of a life change as I have, you expect there to be some sort of fanfare.  Instead, I was just suddenly in Seattle.  Washington really isn't all that different than New York; it actually feels like how New York must have been when New York was still new and shiny.  The roads are similar, the accents are similar, the trees are similar, the weather is similar.

It's only been two days, but I love it here.  And I love being here with Adam.


1 comment: