The settling in portion of the move is finally gaining momentum.

Books, my dearest friends, are filling the shelves, tightly-packed together, by genre, by look, by chapter of my life. Many of my books are well-worn, especially the children’s books I still have – the Scholastic Clifford the Big Red Dog books, the Mother Goose tome with the black and white checkered border, the small tidy stack of Cricket magazines. Each small book box I collapse is a victory against the spectre of moving house, which I admit still looms over me like a droning bully of a ghost. Just shut up, moving ghost, your spirit tires me, and makes me itchy at the smell of cardboard. Shut up.

I found the other little plastic bag that had the rest of the pegs to brace the bookshelves, which was also a victory. I have to leave some of the pegs in the shelving units every time I move because they’re wedged in there, too difficult to pry out. So I leave them, but I worry that in the jangle-rumble of a moving truck, they’ll be rattled loose and will roll away, never to be seen again. But no, the little baggy of extra pegs was found, with a few still left over.

The last time I lived here, I had three bookcases. I moved all three to California, but ditched the smallest one almost immediately, as it was pretty broken up and worn after being shunted around to 4 or 5 different places since it was first purchased almost a decade ago. It’s been tough, getting my books to fit in the two that remain, even though I left several paper shopping bags full of books in the trunk of the car I donated when I left Cali.

It might be prudent to start setting free all of those theatre books I keep holding onto. It’s tough, though: they’re a part of my craft as a storyteller, and they were expensive. They’re also several editions old, which means reselling is almost certainly out of the question.

But enough about the books – I am also seeing to the light. I am moving lamps about, and I even hung up this wacky IKEA chandelier I bought some years back but never had a good place to display it until now. Earlier this evening, I was perched on my kitchen counter, using the cordless drill to start a screw hole for a ceiling hook, and so now there’s a lovely soft blue light for that corner of the apartment. Andy had the exact same light in his old flat in Aberdeen, see:

We’re at the end of this year, now, aren’t we, and people keep saying, “Oh, it went so fast! Where did this year go?”, etc., and I just don’t feel that way at all. I have been waiting for this year to spend itself, spool itself out, run its line until taut against the spindle, and then snap.

These months have been so long, so much waiting for relief, so many weeks and days spent worrying over money and family and personal ambition. A shipwreck in bright, brisk salt water, cold waves lapping in an endless foamy gurgle. Armed with a bailing bucket, fingers pruned, I had eyes strained from matching the sun to the hour. Each month was a trial.

January was death, February was smashed pipe dreams, March was oblivion, April was stubborness, May was hope, June and July were fire and smoke, and August was exhaustion.

September, which I can recall so clearly, is all green, fresh rain, cleansing, squeaky skin and the wide expanses of flooring in an empty apartment air-cooled and sunny at just the right times. October was doubt and hope and a tamping down. November was humility. December is impatience.

Oh, you, oh, this December is the grip of small, fumbling fingers, gripping a blue plastic cylinder wrapped  hundreds of times around with dirty off-white string. There are weals on the skin where the string has burned, and that damnable kite is still swirling and whirling above. It’s a clever, smarmy thing, made sharp and cold by the currents. When that string snaps, when those fingers can loosen their grasp, all that was made here to dive and swoop will be free.

All of this will then (finally) begin to be The Past.