It's the end of the year and my flatmate and I are getting ready to move house together, again.
Last week we were lounging around our living room talking about which items of kitchenware belong to us, and taking an inventory of the couch cushions, when we asked ourselves why we do this every year.
This year moving is not as awful as last year. We spent three whole days last December cleaning out our kitchen and lamenting our appallingly low standard of cleanliness. Thankfully, this year the kitchen only took a matter of hours to clean up.
But moving is still a pain. Every single thing I own seems to weigh more than what a couple of people can reasonably move from one flat to another, and every year I seem to have more belongings, even after yearly culling.
And, furthermore, moving house around the holiday period is possibly the silliest thing anyone in the southern hemisphere has ever thought of. I suppose the answer to ‘‘why do we do this every year'' is quite simple: every year we end up living in a flat that seems OK in the summer but that is just a bit terrible once we're actually living in it.
And, of course, you inevitably get sick of certain flatmates and need to move on. Quite aside from moving being time-consuming and exhausting, it's also melancholy, and I resent it. When I was a child I would get incredibly upset by the idea of moving house, to the point I would panic every time my parents so much as talked about going to an open home.
Now, I'm fairly accustomed to shifting around but I still feel uneasy when I think of moving out of my room and having a stranger moving into it and having a totally different experience than I had. This morning I walked into my flatmate's room and looked at her bare walls and expressed a degree of sadness.
We laughed about it because the flat was an enormous freezing nightmare, but we both felt a little sad about saying goodbye to the weird, cheery yellow walls and totally ineffectual curtains.
Even if a flat is a definitively bad time it's still formative, and it's unsettling to think that once you've shifted out the last of your belongings you might never go back, and you might lose touch with the people you shared bathroom facilities with for a whole year.
It's exciting to find a new flat, and it's not heart-wrenching to leave an old flat, but when you throw summertime malaise and end-of-year blues into the mix the whole process becomes so much worse. I almost feel guilty taking down everything I painstakingly stuck to my walls until the very last minute, and I feel as though I'm betraying my bedroom if I don't appreciate it for the last few days of the year.
I am silly and sentimental, and I have to say goodbye to a flat when I move out, just to make sure it knows it was important to me. And I'm sure not everyone feels this way, but it does seem a little odd we spend the first few years of our 20s living temporary and transient lives.
As I pack up the last of my things, and wipe the last of the inexplicable stains off the walls, I will continue to grumble about moving house every year, at the worst possible time.
And I will convince myself, again, that if I like the flat I'm in next year I'm just going to stay there and stop inconveniencing myself and everyone around me who owns a car.
● Millie Lovelock is a Dunedin student.
