I have a habit of constantly patting my pant pockets when I'm outside home. I run a quick check of whether my mobile phone (right pocket), wallet (left pocket) and apartment keys (also left pocket) are still present or they have been pick-pocketed. And on occasions that I am without one of these, usually because I would have kept my wallet in my backpack, I have a 0.2 second long burst of panic before I recall where it is.
This happened to me recently, but not with the wallet. I felt around my pocket as usual and I could feel the absence of my keys. I stopped dead and panicked for my usual 0.2 seconds! Being without the key was a scary thought. I usually have a spare key in my office but I would have to endure the commute to the office and right under the fury of the sun at the hottest point of the day. And this spare key is only for the door to my apartment, not the apartment building itself.
To enter the building I needed a different key for which I was never given a spare. I don't know why the landlord did it this way, but I had just received one key for the building door and I had never asked for another. The door is usually open, but if someone has per chance locked it, I would have to call my neighbour, hope that she is at home and request her to unlock this door for me. Even if I could enter the building and my apartment eventually, I would have to then pay money to get a spare made, maybe file some report to the police for the official records, etc.
I had thought about this scenario several times before to psych myself into never forgetting my keys, especially since my apartment has an "auto-locking" system where the moment you close the door from the outside, you need a key to get back in. Maybe this is a better protection against people forgetting to lock the door, but I think forgetting the keys inside is a much bigger danger.
0.2 seconds later, the panic faded. The keys were indeed missing and I had only an empty key-chain in my pocket. Neither did I have the keys on my person anywhere else - not in my backpack, not my shirt pocket. I simply had no keys because it was no longer my apartment. I was just returning from the key handover and making my way over to my friend's house. He had kindly agreed to let me stay at his place to bridge the days between the day of my apartment handover and the day of my departing flight.
It was a departure from the country, from a number of people with whom I have developed deep friendships and personal relationships. A flight from one country to another, from one life to another. And in that moment, it somehow sunk in. I would never hold those keys again. I would never walk in that apartment again. It was somehow all so sudden. A month ago it was a fully stocked apartment, a home, an abode in which I had spent upwards of three and a half years. In a town whose many alleys I had walked in quiet exploration to clear my mind. Whose many woods and paths I had run across to get in my weekly kilometres for half marathon training.
Suddenly, now it was an empty building that I was barred from entering. Clean walls replaced the cobwebs that had made their homes on my walls. The layers of dust on various untouched surfaces were gone when I had done my final cleaning. There was no bed. I ordered a pizza home earlier that day but I had nowhere to sit down and eat it. My chairs and tables which had hosted a dozen people and more were simply absent.
This was home. Soon it would be an alien small town, far away from me, largely irrelevant to my life. It would never appear in the news. The view from my window where I watched the icy winter turn to the fresh green leaves of spring, then to the fierce, almost overgrown green of summer, to the orangish hues of autumn, back to the bare, dull brown of winter would be gone. That favourite corner where I spent reading so many books and mindlessly scrolling so much internet nonsense will be someone else's corner.
I come back with an empty key-ring on an empty key-chain. I fly back to a place I once called home, more than a decade ago. A place which never ceased being home, but somehow also stopped being a home.
Nearly four years of my life are packed neatly and tightly in a few suitcases and bags. To start over again. It is daunting and exciting.