Backing Out and Settling In: What Happened When I Moved House and Signed Up For a Spoken Word Event

I left in August 2018, as the long, hot, summer drew to a close.

After months of uncertainty, endless house viewings, and many sleepless nights wondering if I was doing the right thing, it was finally happening.

I was moving house...and leaving Manchester.

Priced out of the city suburb I’d called home for fifteen years, and with two growing children to consider, I’d cast the search net for our new home much wider than ever before and in my clammy palm, I now clutched the keys to my future- forty miles North in a small town called Bacup, where I knew absolutely no-one.

Suddenly, I had everything I’d spent the better part of a year planning for, and – predictably – I hated it.

I cried every day for the first three months.

In the September, amidst all the crying and unpacking and more crying, a lovely friend invited me to the spoken word night she was running back in Manchester.

I’d been along to one earlier in the year, but only as a spectator, and at the end of the night she’d suggested that next time I should take a slot on the open mic. The theme was going to be ‘weird love’, and drunk on three cans of Red Stripe and riding a delicious nicotine high from passive smoking, I promised I would, declaring that I would write a piece about my epic teen crush on our cross-eyed wheelie-bin cleaner.

Meanwhile, in my new house in the hills, I couldn’t sleep. The new black-out curtains obliterated the timid glow of the streetlamps, and even the occasional passing car failed to make any impact on the deafening silence that poured in through the open bedroom window. In the pitch-black silence, I wondered if I’d moved, or died.

One night I got up at 3 am and made myself a mug of warm milk, wrapped myself in a blanket, and sat down in my new, yellow armchair armed with a notepad and pen, determined to prove that even if I couldn’t sleep in this new place, I could still write.

I wrote without thinking, aiming to just get some words down so that I’d have something to clutch in my shaking hands at the spoken word event, which was now looming on the horizon.

I never went, of course.

The move had raked up my anxiety like a plough. The day came, and the excuses flowed as easily as my tears.

I’d been off sick from work the week before, my voice still hadn’t quite recovered, I was tired, anxious, I’d never done spoken word before- what if I was terrible? I had childcare issues, I was running late- why psych myself up for something all day only to miss the bus anyway?

I felt bad, as I always do when I become the flake my anxiety tells me I am, but I still broke my promise. I still didn’t go.

The notebook was gradually buried under the decades of *stuff* that came spilling from heavily-taped boxes, and I busied myself arranging and rearranging that stuff *just so* hoping that at some point, I’d stumble on the magic arrangement that would make the new house feel like home.

Months passed, and before I could find that elusive combination, I woke up to realise it was the last day of the school year. Unlike me, the kids had adapted beautifully, settling into their new school just as though they’d always been there. Accepting what I couldn’t: that this was it now. This was our home.

All day, I felt acutely aware of the minutes and hours ticking away- my last chance to get any real writing done before the lazy chaos of the summer holidays began, but I couldn’t settle to anything. I opened google doc after google doc, flicking through old notebooks, looking for that elusive spark. It was in the back of one – hastily scrawled in black Biro – that I found the piece I’d written for the spoken word night.

It was untitled and messy. At the top of the page,  I’d written:

‘Loving places- Manchester vs Bacup???’

I read it and I cried (for a change).

I realised then that I couldn’t go back and force myself to take the stage, but that maybe, just maybe, I could move forward.

Here they are- my raw, unedited, and unspoken words:

It’s a strange thing, to promise yourself to one when your heart already lies with another.

Perhaps I’m to blame, but it seemed obvious to me that it wasn’t mine to give. That if it could be won at all, it would be after a long and bloody battle that saw it clawed, still beating, from my chest.

After fifteen years its rhythm is hardwired, and here I am, changing the beat.

Suddenly all the irritating habits are quirks, idiosyncrasies, softened by distance. The faults of my new love, jarring in their strangeness. Not worse, but different.

I don’t yet know this landscape, these roads aren’t mapped and printed in my mind.

Wrong turns are catastrophes, and I ask myself how long until I know this new place, and myself in it.

‘Good on you,’ people say when I tell them I’m leaving. But they stay. And I wonder, is it envy I see in their eyes, or pity- at walking away.

And so I find myself sneaking back. Mutual friends, a sense of obligation, convenience…the excuses are as plentiful as my visits. But I never stay the night.

We both know it wouldn’t be right. This isn’t home anymore.

So I drift between my old love and my new, loved by neither, loyal to none.

But not without hope.

When the sun sets over the valley, like a lover’s eyes closing, peaks- and cheeks- tinged with pink, I remember why.

Why I chose this new love over the old. The beauty in the strange.

The kiss may feel unfamiliar after a lifetime. Teeth bumping and lips bruised. But it is, after all, a kiss.