My Bags Are Packed, I'm Ready to Go...

Sometimes I think it would be cool to think like a little kid again and believe that if I cover my eyes then, to everyone around me, I would be invisible. The logic is infallible. If I can't see you, you can't see me! Because that's what I always assumed moms meant when they put the bag of M&Ms in the top drawer and said, "Out of sight, out of mind."

Even if in reality those M&Ms, especially the peanut ones, did in fact disappear. I just assumed that my mom was secretly a magician. Who happened to love peanut M&Ms. Huh.

Well, while we all have our denial rituals set up in childhood it's not very often you see an adult at a bus stop plugging their ears and yelling, "I can't hear you!" at a cell phone. I think the vibrate and silent mode invention went a long way to help that problem out, but that doesn't mean we don't still deny things each and every day. As adults--just because I'm over eighteen doesn't mean I enjoy calling myself that--we just find more subtle ways to express it.

 Or not.

I have a friend here, whose name I will withhold for privacy, let's call him Shawn, who really does not want to go back to Michigan. He is in love with Tübingen. I'm not exaggerating at all. If this town where a female, he would watch the Notebook with it and cry at all the right parts just to weasel it into inviting him up to his place for 'coffee', he is that enamored by a city. 

Maybe that helps you understand how hard it is for him to have to tell that city that he is leaving. He refuses to go to the office to turn in his ex-matriculation paper, but instead says that he'll just keep them. Someone had to physically remove the form from his hands and put it in the drop box and then he slouched all the way back to his apartment which he refuses to begin packing up.

Ultimately what I'm getting at is that I moved out of my apartment yesterday. I vacuumed it, very possibly for the first time--the dust bunny army was forming ranks--packed up my Tiger-Ente, and rolled my suitcases out. The room had never been much more than a white-walled prison cell, but man, it looked especially empty as the hausmeister walked in to examine it. After making me wash a wall ("That needs to be washed with a damp cloth." 
"Oh, okay..."
"Now."
"Oh, now."
"Now." )   I signed over my keys and said goodbye to my first, and very possibly last, German apartment. The hausmeister told me I was an easy move-out and I could only imagine what he'd say to Shawn as he will probably grab hold of the door handle for dear life and refuse to leave. As I left the city though I think I might have gotten a twinge of what Shawn had been feeling the last few weeks, but I only really noticed it as I ate my, possibly, last Tübingen ice cream cone. It was white chocolate coconut. I'll never forget.