baslog

I am moving house, a half life disappears today...

So there is an endless amount of things that are more depressing than leaving a city to move to another city, a bigger city, a more vibrant city, for a job that all things considered is pretty perfect. So I don’t want to complain too much. But still… When you leave a city after almost ten years of living there, happily most of the time, and you sit in an empty apartment with nothing but a blow up bed, a pair of fresh underwear and a suitcase full of memories, melancholy is about to set in.

So tonight was our last night in Minneapolis. Things moved much quicker than expected, the movers came earlier than we thought, and will get our stuff in Chicago a couple of days before what we anticipated. So before we could blink, our last night in Minneapolis was here. No big goodbyes or drunken, emotional farewells, just some drinks and pizza at our friends’ place. I met up with some people over the last couple of days I hadn’t seen in a while, but nothing too emotional. I prefer to just close the door behind me and move on, I’ll stay in touch with some people and lose contact with others, such is life. Whether or not we had a big hugfest when I was leaving won’t change that.

I did have a list in my head of things I wanted to do before leaving, visit some places, restaurants, bars, parks, places, museums, houses I lived in, but I just did not get around to it, and that’s probably just as well. As Morrissey would say, all these things, “it’s only bricks and mortar.” What you cherish about these places are the memories and these cannot be revisited, but as Boudewijn de Groot would say "die neem je mee zolang je leeft."

Yeah, I’ll miss things. The breakfast place below our apartment, which had become a second home, the bar with the late night happy hour where they know your order before you sit down, the Vietnamese lunch place where the waitress does not even bother bringing you the lunch menu because she knows you will have the chicken sweet and sour –again- and countless other places where I felt pretty comfortable. But these are just routines, and I am pretty sure that given some time, I will find my comfort zone in Chicago. There is perhaps one exception, the Urban Bean Coffee house, a coffee place in south Minneapolis where I wrote most of my dissertation. A very laid black hang out with a mixture of locals, grad students, clueless Marxists and other people with no real jobs or purpose in life. They always played good music and it was rarely crowded. If you would go there often enough you would always see the same people, which was enough to create a weird sense of community, without actually having to talk to anyone. I also downloaded a lot of music from other people’s computers there. That’s a place I will miss. I somehow feel that is a very unique , typically Minneapolis place. It is not busy and hopping like a big city coffeeshop, but somehow still had a cool, urban vibe. And in a way, that’s Minneapolis. Not a huge city, not a vibrant city, but a city with a cool laid back urban vibe with quite a few interesting people in it.

Otherwise, yeah, it feels a bit weird leaving town. Because I had a great time here. It’s like leaving your student town after you graduated. You can’t help but reminisce about all the good times that are quickly disappearing in the rear view mirror, but at the same time you realize that these times belong in the rear view mirror. As I write this, it is 1.41 am. I always thought that I would spend my last night in Minneapolis at a favorite watering hole, quickly downing drinks, surrounded by those who would dearly miss me, but I am spending it blogging (still with beer within reach), listening to “Late Night, Maudlin Street” (Morrissey) and “The Bauhaus Chair” (Nits). Things never pan out the way you think they will. Perhaps that’s not a bad thing.