Germany lay behind me as the train once more heads down south. For the first day in weeks I feel I have a moment to breath. The past week too many things were on my plate.
Mind occupied, I did not consciously register that I would not be there next week. Perhaps I have grown accustom to “temporary” or maybe I never made Magdeburg my home, but I felt little about leaving the city. I will not miss it, I was never happy there. Yet the intensity in some goodbyes left me strangely heartbroken. Having spend so little time with people outside the office, I guess I had not anticipated the possibility that I might be missed.
As the last week progressed, piece after piece of our apartment disappeared. A while back the balcony couches went poof, then the WG-excuse of a living room slowly disintegrated, then the kitchen started to looked a bit stripped. This week came, and like soap-bubbles the remaining objects disappeared. Washing machine – poof, refrigerator – poof, the entire kitchen – poof poof poofilipoof. Living on the fifth floor without an elevator, our poof-method of choice was to get random strangers from the Internet to pick up the potentially-useful-“antiques”. Despite a lot of poofing, most was deemed definitely-useless-junk and I must admit that while I cannot remember the number of trips up and down the stairs, I can feel them.
In between cleaning, moving, packing, and goodbyes, I did my best to eat all my remaining food, I spent late evenings making jam of the left-over frozen berries, and most importantly: wrote, prepared and held presentation of my thesis proposal. To be honest, reading the document it is not as bad as I would expect from the situation of its birth. But a mild discomfort about the presentation remains, I did not live up to my own expectations.
Taking a last minute walk through town I came to the conclusion, that like usually, I felt absurd attachments to things of no importance. Passing the opera I was upset I missed the latest ballet performance, the Golden coffee cup (won for best coffee drinking performance this month) looked lonely on the empty office shelf and I wished I explained to the lovely owners of the Arabic bakery why I would not come back in a while.
Outside the window lay the Alps tucked into a blanket of rainy clouds. The upcoming autumn bringing all the comforts of terrible weather. This will be a good, I am certain.