La nouvelle langue des jours

Well hello lovelies.

See my pretty new curtains? See?

Much more fiery than the last batch, and somehow that feels appropriate to me. Yay, fiery.

Some things here are the same, and some are distinctly different, and I am still adjusting to that.

It occurs to me that I've made myself at home in various places by bringing a small group of (unremarkable to anyone else) objects with me. So that my space feels familiar, no matter where it's located. I'm not sure what that means, if anything, though I know that I like to feel that I am entering my own brain when I come home.

I'm watching a movie I've seen before, in which the main character has short-term memory loss and essentially has to reinvent her life every day, to remind herself of where she is and everything that's going on.

It means she approaches each day with a certain freshness, a zest for the most minor things - waffles she ate yesterday but can't remember, kissing a boyfriend she has to re-meet again and again, a pineapple upside-down cake. She paints giant lily plants on a wall each day, and each night her brother and father whitewash over it so she can paint them anew.

There is always something evocative about this movie to me, which is why I've watched it many times.

Tonight what's hitting me is that this is a bit what moving to a new place feels like. It's still me, it's still my things (or some of them - the ones that I didn't get rid of, and the ones that escaped the clutches of the world's worst movers). The cat is much the same. But even she senses that maybe the rules can be rewritten here. She's been climbing on certain pieces of furniture she never climbed on before. She's testing her limits, even as I'm rewriting mine.

I hadn't realized how much my days are shaped by habit. It's disconcerting, in some ways, to not have access to the same rhythms, the same resources.

I can't find some of the things I always took for granted at the local grocery stores: red lentils, frozen lemonade. And the prices are exorbitant compared to my old neighborhood.

I have a shorter bike ride to get to my haunts, and while that frees me up to do a lot more socializing, it also means that I have to think about getting exercise. Which is weird. In the old place, a 40-minute ride was built in.

There are parks and other beautiful places here, but the hood itself is a bit rougher-looking, and I am not sure how safe I am walking home at night.

Essentially, there is a whole new language to learn. The language of days, and I am a rank beginner.