From 6 To 9: A True Story About Moving Home And Moving On

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It’s been a long time.

The last 48 hours has take a very long time and has gone by fast. The blinds are drawing on Sunday and whilst I’ve overcome one of life’s more stressful moments with relative difficulty this weekend, I feel unfulfilled. For the last year or so I’ve developed this need for sticking to my guns and with that a huge fear of change. This extremely strong fear of things changing, let’s call it a flaw because, ultimately, that’s what it is, probably explains why I was up from 2am on Friday morning shaking, sweating and falling deeper and deeper into a hole that doesn’t even exist. And it doesn’t. But in the moment when you’re staring at something gargantuan, nothing could be more apparent.

Eventually it rolled around to midday and I started working, picking up literal pieces of my life, occasional exhausted tears blurring what I needed to do, an incredibly frustrating but entirely necessary process. Because without exorcising the problem, you don’t move on or at least move by temporarily. Stress, arguments and falling outs ensued and the next thing I knew and one of the last things I remember was standing under the door to a world I ran to when all else failed me, when all else left me behind and when nothing else was willing to take me in all battered and bruised from the inside out, vacuum in one hand, my grandfather’s Saint Christopher that I nearly left behind in the other and I walked away to a whole new one.
Anyone who knows me will look at what I’ve left and what I’ve come to and shake their head because I haven’t really moved that far both in area and emotionally and won’t understand the effort it took to go quite literally from 6 to 9.

But if you even want to understand, if anyone wants to understand you’ll have to realise how truly sensitive I am and how hidden I keep that. Because six was my imaginary friend who no-one else knew, not the pretentious Zegna wearing guy that came before me and no-one else before, because for at least 6 months six was my best friend. I would go to work, dragging myself with everything I had before dragging myself home just to be in the warmth again. Three walls and one huge fucking window; we shared that element of having one side that was exposed to the world and I envied that I could lower the blind in 6 and couldn’t do this myself when it was all I wanted.

When your heart breaks and it breaks hard enough to make you run away you’ll expose no-one and if anyone tries you will retreat and I retreated to six a lot and that’s why it became my friend. It was clean, clinical and hard to understand; and I loved six for it.

So with a healed heart I found myself stood on the doorstep, the doors locked for the last time never to be seen again, and I stood and said goodbye in my head at 10.31pm and my heart released. And I slept. I slept for 4 hours which is progress for me and last night I got 6.

To distract myself from unpacking my life all over again exactly one year since I’d done it before, I made plans for the weekend and met people, people who either didn’t know me a year ago, wouldn’t have wanted to or who knew me too well to speak to for the longest time as well as the most desirable and unsettlingly beautiful person I think I’ve ever met. That’s what we do when we can’t dig ourselves down any further; we remove the soil and the rocks and surround ourselves with true diamonds.

I wish it had gone how I wanted it to but it obviously wasn’t to be for me on these last days. But whilst I felt little this weekend after Friday’s emotional apocalypse, I can look back on one year ago as of right now and say ‘Thank you six, you have no idea what you gave me, you beautiful inanimate object, you cold, harshly white being that woke me up too early and allowed me to stay up way too late, that tolerated my insomnia and invisible fisticuffs whilst I fought myself every night. And finally for helping me feel way too much again.’

I hope someone will take me in like you did someday and allow me to be every part of me, at my best, at my worst and somewhere in the middle; I’m rarely in the middle but that’s part of the negotiation; because I felt so little this weekend because there’s so much more than three walls and a big window and I went out in the hope to see it. Even though I didn’t see it like I wanted to, I’d rather this life than what I had in the murky hole that I could barely see out of one year ago this weekend.