Pick Up Sticks...

The tree that was my life had itself chopped down at it's roots, and turned into so much kindling.  Now I'm in the process of picking through the branches and sticks, and seeing how much of it can be salvaged for replanting elsewhere, and how much is just so much kindling to use for lighting a Samhain fire to feed the pain to the past.

It's been nearly a week now since I had to be finished with moving out of my old family home.  The keys have been turned over to the new owners.  My household items (at least those which I kept) are safely in a storage unit.  My bedroom has been set up in the spare room over at my boyfriend's place, and I'm slowly getting everything in order and finding a place for it in a vastly more limited space than I'm used to dealing with.  The dog settled back in as though he'd never left.  (He's one of the last litter of pups that my boyfriend's dog had, whom I had taken over to my place with me.)  The cat is adjusting well, and has come to his own terms with the roomies' resident cat, Pandora.  (Rather aptly named little psychopath that she is.)

The sense of dislocation is intense.  Despite my boyfriend and his (now my) room mates doing everything in their power to make me feel both at home and like part of this extended family, it feels far from "Home" to me so far.  Granted, I've only been here for a week, and I'm still putting things away, but that hasn't helped in coping with the nearly overwhelming changes.

Every day - pretty much every 2 or 3 hours while I'm awake that we're not at work - I'm reminded forcibly of just how vast the changes are when I have to go outside to smoke if I want to put a stop to the insistent nicotine cravings.  Going in the back yard feels strange, simply because I didn't make an attempt to disconnect the hot tub from it's separate fuse box and bring it over here. (It would have been a rather useless lawn ornament if I had - requiring the time and money to get wiring installed so it could be run, and then requiring that a service tech take a look at it to finally determine what was wrong with the pump so that it ran in the first place.)  All of my various paintings and other artwork is in storage, so the walls of my bedroom are bleakly bare of the hangings that I'm used to having up. 

The sounds and sights and smells of this house ... just aren't..... "right" somehow, to the subconscious portions of my brain.  It seriously hasn't had time to adjust yet to any of this.  I keep reminding myself to give myself some time to get used to it.  Then I tell myself that I can't afford to get Too used to it, since I'm still looking for a place of my own to move into, and at some point in the next few months I'm going to have to go through the whole danged process over again.  Though at least when I move out of here into my own place, I won't have to go through the tedious pain in the rump that is boxing everything up and moving furniture from one house to another - just from storage into whatever apartment or rent house I happen to finally locate.