Three Moves in One Year

The first time we moved Juan, there were fewer boxes than he'd told us there would be.

People almost always overestimate. He'd done it the other way round, which is rarer, and usually means the same thing: some of what was in that flat wasn't going with him.

He was moving to a smaller place. He carried the plant himself, on his lap, in the front seat, and we talked about the weather, which was doing the specific grey thing Porto does in March. He was polite the whole way. At the new place he told us where things went and thanked us properly and we left.

There are jobs you drive away from and think about for a day or two afterwards. That was one.

He called again about five months later.

I knew before he'd finished the first sentence. You can hear it in how somebody books a move — this one had a date he was excited about and a list that kept growing while we were on the phone.

More boxes this time. A bigger place out towards the beach, shared with two friends, the kind of flat that has a spare room nobody has decided what to do with yet. He'd bought a bike. It came in the van, on its side, wrapped in a blanket, and he apologised for it about four times.

The third move was roughly a year after the first.

He was moving in with someone. Which meant two of everything: two kettles, two ironing boards, four saucepans in a country where nobody owns four saucepans. There is a particular comedy to merging two flats and everybody involved knows it, and we spent most of that afternoon laughing about which of the two sofas was going to survive.

(I've mixed a few people together in this. Juan is real, and so is the woman who went from a small flat on her own, to a place with friends, to a bright apartment with the boyfriend she'd reconciled with. I've blurred what I could between them. The shape is exact. The details aren't anyone's in particular.)

We know nothing about those eleven months

Here's the thing I keep coming back to.

We weren't there for the part where it got better. We don't know if there was a night it turned, or a conversation, or whether it just wore off slowly the way most things do. We didn't see the job interview, or the argument, or the Tuesday he decided to buy a bike.

We saw three days. Three doorways. We got the stills and none of the film.

And I've started to think that's not a limitation of this job. It's the strange privilege of it.

Because you cannot see your own progress

You live it at normal speed. A year is three hundred and sixty-five days of it not visibly working — of the flat still being small, the language still being hard, the job still being the job. Nothing in a life announces itself as an improvement while it's happening. It's just Wednesday, again.

We see you in March and then again in November. And because we're the ones carrying the furniture both times, we notice things you can't: that there's more of it. That it's better. That somebody in this house bought a proper table.

That's true of nearly everyone we move twice, and it is overwhelmingly true of people who moved here from somewhere else. Immigration in particular feels, from the inside, like standing still while working extremely hard. From the outside, at eight-month intervals, it looks like what it actually is, which is somebody building a life at a fairly astonishing speed.

The couple whose flat got too small because of the baby, going somewhere with a room for him. The people who move once and then move again to a street they actually chose. Nobody in those vans thinks of themselves as someone whose life is visibly improving. They think of themselves as someone with a lot to carry.

Not every year goes that way, and we see those too. I'm not going to describe them. They belong to the people who lived them, and they get the same van and the same care and the same cat keyring at the door.

But I can tell you the ratio, and the ratio is good.

So if you're in the middle of one of those years right now, and it doesn't feel like it's going anywhere — that's what the middle feels like. It isn't evidence of anything. Nobody gets to watch their own life at the speed we get to watch it.

You'd need somebody who only ever shows up on the days something changed.