Limbo

THE Ides of March of this year was a day we had long been wary of. It began, as I suppose all moving days do, early, and with little sense of tranquility. The air mattress we'd been using for a bed still needed to be collapsed and folded. The food we intended to eat was still lying out on the counter amid stacks of plates and saucers. The children, despite our best attempts at preparation, had no idea what was about to take place, and couldn't quite understand why this day wasn't as leisurely as any other. Partially packed boxes that still awaited the last perfectly shaped object(s) before being satisfyingly shut and sealed were scattered throughout the apartment.

The movers would arrive at 9am, and they would waste no time in dismantling, wrapping, taping, labeling, stacking, and ultimately packing every last one of our worldly possessions in a 20' shipping container parked on a flatbed just outside the building.

That night, after the frenzied rush to vacuum and mop the place (who could have known what monstrous, fanged dust bunnies the vanishing furniture would reveal?) before the vacuum was given away and the flat was inspected, we slept at a friend's house. The girls, exhausted, dropped off almost instantly. We ordered an Indian take-out that we would be too tired to finish — we'd be carrying around the uneaten pakoras like dazed vagrants until reaching airport security, who characteristically failed to find any humor in it, the following day — and gave ourselves to sleep, albeit hesitantly, knowing that only the 4:30am alarm could get us to the airport in time.

Since then we've been a diaspora of four, living in a sort of stateless limbo that is both a liberation and a bother. Three suitcases, no rent, no utilities, no meals to cook, helping hands with the children; and yet not at home, everything pending, with no proper address ("Well, you see," I explained to the confused concierge who wanted to make sure all the credit card details were on the up-and-up, "it's probably officially still billed to a Hamburg address, but we've just left there and haven't yet arrived at the US address, which is technically our current address, and so..."), and eager to begin that warmly gratifying process of settling into the new home and claiming it as our own.

This Zwischenzeit was unavoidable. Not that its mild inconveniences make it something worth avoiding; but still. The shipping container will be in transit for more than a month, making its way from Bremerhaven to Seattle via the Panama Canal. There were friends and family to see. Truth be told, with three years since our last vacation, my wife and I needed the opportunity for a break (which, starting tomorrow, we will get). And in some respects it's only an extension of our time in Germany, where more often than not we were regarded as misfits who could never quite get to grips with the German mentality, with all its inherent Schadenfreude and superciliousness and worship of certificates and Korrekt-ness, and therefore couldn't quite call the place home, even if we had desperately wanted to. Perhaps we've been in limbo longer than I realize, and I was only fooled into thinking otherwise by the lull of routine and the regular visits from the postman.