This evening Zsolt and I removed nearly all the boxes from our apartment. We’ve been holding onto these boxes ever since moving from England, if not longer.

Cockroach Update: The exterminator came round today and laid a paste in various/many locations of the apartment. That’s right, you read correctly – Exterminator. Turns out the entire building has a cockroach problem, so the landlord is tackling each flat. I haven’t at all built a ‘community through cockroaches’ (excepting a 1 minute conversation in the corridor today that involved three opened doors with heads sticking out as we all exchanged with the exterminator about the problem), but at least the issue is being handled throughout the building.

Sending our boxes into the light.

So this evening Zsolt and I packed up the boxes to be put out for recycling. Apparently cockroaches like the cardboard glue. It just felt so strange to let these pieces of corrugated cardboard go . . . like I totally didn’t want to, like somehow I’d assigned emotions to these boxes and getting rid of them was cutting me off.

But what emotions could they be? Attachment to England? The feeling of not yet being home (since we’ve been storing boxes ever since moving to the UK, where they hid on top of closets, under the bed and behind the sofa)? The lack of moving ease?

I’ll psychoanalyze myself a moment, and say that for nearly the past seven years Zsolt and I have become accustomed to being transient. The idea that we would stay put – in one flat, for a long period of time really does feel bizarre. Like, could this place be home? Are we home? Can a place you rent be home, aren’t we not home until we buy our property? But there go the boxes – out into the street for the recycling truck to collect.

We’re transient without anywhere to go, or any means to easily get there. So maybe we should just change mental modes and instead be ‘settled’ .  . . settlers, who settle, and grow tomato plants and get to know their neighbours in a way that actually sticks.

Well . . . I don’t know. The cockroaches have forced us to get rid of the moving boxes. We have to accept being here. I guess in a way that’s one step closer toward community, eh?

The boxes are going.

We are staying.

The cockroaches must die.