Mantras, Sometimes They Work.

As I lay in bed staring at the skyline of downtown Nashville for the last time, I was sad; just plain sad.  As I started to fall asleep, I let my mantra repeat itself in my head “It will be fine, I will be fine” over and over, my version of counting sheep.

I woke up the next morning to the official Moving Day and a gloomy morning on downtown Nashville.  As I climbed out of bed, it dawned on me I had packed all my food, my teapot, and the coffee.  I panicked slightly wondering how I was going to get through this very long and very hard day without any coffee.  The movers showed up at 9:30 am, and it took them exactly SEVEN HOURS to pack 1,000 square feet.  Behind schedule by about FOUR hours, we loaded in our little Fiat and started on our journey.  Because everything was so behind, I didn’t have any time for tears or nostalgia, I just piled myself into our car and didn’t look back.

It wasn’t until we were somewhere in Kentucky in the dark the tears started to flow. I didn’t say anything, just silently cried and mourned the city I had grown to love.  I had so many voicemails on my phone from friends telling me they loved me and told me how they would miss me, and I just kept playing them in my head.  I had to remind myself of my mantra once again and after repeating it several times, the tears stopped.  We stopped for the night in Ohio, and as I stared at the wall where my skyline should have been, I once again repeated “It will be fine, I will be fine” until the next thing I knew, the sun was shining, and birds were chirping.

When I woke up in Ohio, and we packed our car, Rob gently asked “how are you?” and for the first time in twenty-four hours, neither did I have the familiar sense of dread nor did I burst into tears.  “I really am fine” was my response as I got into our car.  The sun was shining, it was 68 degrees, and the birds were singing; I felt like I was in the movie Song of the South and I seriously looked for the bluebird that should be sitting on my shoulder.

As we pulled into Albany and the driveway of our new home, things started to unravel quickly.  There was a hiccup with the moving company and as I sat in our empty townhouse in Albany with all our stuff sitting in the moving truck in Nashville, (it seems our stuff wanted to stay in Nashville almost as much as I did) Rob was in a meeting.

Just like that some past came into the future and in the blink of an eye we were dealing with shit that we thought we wouldn’t ever have to deal with again.  This said “shit” was a very dark period of our lives and time didn’t make it any lighter.  While we found time may have healed the wounds, one phone call ripped them all open, and it was like we were living the same nightmare over again. After massive panic attacks on both our parts, we decided we could not live in Albany.  We packed our little Fiat and drove back home. Luckily for us, our apartment had NOT been rented yet, our daughter had a spare mattress laying around (she says because if the boyfriend moves out, a girl’s gotta have a mattress) and moved home. Our stuff is STILL in a moving truck, but now it is in Atlanta.  The moving company believes they will be able to deliver it to Nashville on Tuesday; I am not exactly sure why it takes days for them to move it 250 miles, but I’m just glad it hadn’t made it to Albany just yet.

That night as I laid my head down on my borrowed mattress in my apartment I love so much I looked out at my beautiful skyline once again.  I thought to myself; things are so crazy right now, jobs are all up in the air, money is tighter than ever, but I got to hug my chickens today.  I had a husband laying next to me whose face was not the color of a fire truck as it had been for the last few days and I closed my eyes and repeated that mantra and fell soundly asleep.