You get used to different backdrops. The stack of CDs on the left; a faded pink headboard on the right, and my bed, in various states of disarray. When I come back to this country to visit, maybe a year from now, the bed will be gone, the room rearranged with guests in mind. Already, this room looks so much emptier. Shelves are left clear. Cupboards are empty. I am moving around a third of the things I own, but two thirds doesn’t look like much when it’s spread out.
It’s not the moving that feels strange - I’ve moved before, to student houses and apartment complexes sixty miles away, often bringing more and more of my belongings as the year progressed. What makes this different is where I’ll be weighing anchor - studying in York, there was always the sense that Stockport was my home, where I’d lay my head once all of this was over. This time is different.
Tomorrow night, I will fall asleep next to Arden, and I know that while the surroundings may take some getting used to, that visceral feeling of being home will already be present. Home can be a lot of things, I suppose. Here, it’s my parents, and my best friend living five minutes away, and that purple stripe above the curtain rail, and thinking in the metric system. There are a thousand things in this country that make it feel like home, and one person in the United States who, for me, captures that feeling without the backup of the sort of cultural backdrop you can assimilate over twenty-three years.
The rest - guessing the weather outside without mental arithmetic, dealing with an over-reliance on cars, approaching an economy with different priorities to the UK - will take time. But I’m not worried. I’ll have the company of someone truly remarkable while I navigate through the small stuff, and that’s more than enough.