Notes on Moving Out
Notes on my now-empty room and the cat waiting at the new place.
Last day at the old place. I’m nowhere near ready to go.
There’s a typhoon parading the city, apparently. And this is the last time I’m looking out my window—Uptown mall right across; at night it lights up with thin LED facade streaks down the glass. I’ve watched those lights turn on almost a thousand times, every day at six in the evening. It’s usually when I would sit at my desk to watch a movie or get on a call with Lee, with those LED lights directly in my line of sight. So, I guess, in a way, I will always associate those lights with routine and comfort. Not getting to see them anymore at the new place will take quite a while to adjust to.
On the kitchen counter sits my work laptop, tasks piled up on a Sunday night but I’d rather just be in this space here one last time. The last time I’m walking down this tiny hall. The last time I’m stepping into my room. The last time I’m sitting on my bed, now without its sheets and my warm comforter.
I sit and I cry a little—and then a lot.
I imagine I’m in a play on stage like it’s a performance, with an audience, to try and trick my brain into thinking it’s not real. I stare at the yellow wallpaper and almost feel suffocated the way Charlotte Perkins Gilman described it in her book—except here, I’m the one haunting this room because I don’t want to let go. But I should be okay. I should be. There is a lovely little cat waiting for me at the new place. We only moved so we could adopt him.
Not more than a month ago, I was singing him a lullaby as he rests—Mio—in one of the consultation rooms at the veterinary clinic, trying to calm him down. My fingers glided through the space between his eyes—well, eye now, and I couldn’t help but think to myself how fragile, how delicate, this little thing is. We brought him in that same week for an eye enucleation surgery; the infection had gotten worse, and he hadn’t eaten for days. It was a pain, though, trying to catch him. It took us exactly three days.
We met him on a common day in February this year. Well, my mom did. And then I was introduced to him a little after that. He was a tiny, frail thing. A baby cow cat, scared, poor little thing, shaking. His left eye clouded with infection. But he was perfect. Though our building didn’t allow pets, so all we could do then was feed him and hope he’d stay close and not leave.
By then, we had already started feeding another cat—Muji, though the community calls him Esbee, with his fun little socks. You could say he was my first cat. He found me sometime in 2024, I forgot exactly when, but I remember feeling lonely that one night when I was picking up my dinner and he randomly came up to me, latching onto my legs and meowing at me. I didn’t have cat food with me then, and I felt so guilty not having anything to feed him after he had just comforted me. So, not long after that, my mom and I decided to start feeding him regularly.
And then came Mio, crying to my mom for help. On that first day, she gave him some of Muji’s treats, which Mio rushed to eat. He was hungry and lost, so lost, making biscuits with his tiny little paws. Back then he could only handle chicken fillet soup from Ciao because he struggled with anything too solid. He was wary, as he should’ve been, and would not come anywhere near us and quietly ate at his plate.
My mom was, altogether, not that much into the idea of keeping a pet. As I type this now I realize that maybe Muji was, perhaps, Mio’s little guardian angel. Without us meeting and caring for him first, my mom probably would not have had the capacity to want to adopt Mio in the first place. I am going to miss Muji because I’m not sure how often I’ll be able to feed him, given the highly stressful job I currently have.
But I’ve been thinking—it’s strange how a small innocent thing like a cat can rearrange your life like that. A whole apartment. A whole routine. And so, I packed half my life into boxes because a cat needed safety and soft blankets and a little bit of patience. I guess love sometimes comes in the shape of an animal that doesn’t know yet how to trust you, but tries anyway.
And now I’m here, on the last night in this place, and my room now hums with the silent lull of the night instead of the quiet hum of my AC unit, or the soft echoes of whatever Netflix show my mom was watching in the living room just outside. So, to the soft silence, I listen. I try to speak and my voice easily echoes across my tiny room, now empty. Huh, it doesn’t used to do that and now it does. The emptiness around me sinks in and suddenly things are serious—this is serious. This will be your last time here, Chia. This is not a joke. I used to think I would leave this place feeling tired of it or only when I’ve grown sick of it because I’ve simply outgrown it. Like how it was at the previous place because of the admin’s poor maintenance: I grew physically sick because of mold issues in the building and I was coughing for five months. We moved out and found this place two years ago; that damned cough instantly went away. And so this then-new place felt a lot like a sanctuary of some sorts at the time. I’m not ready to go and I really, really, thought I’d be leaving with some sense of repulsion to hold onto, at least. Instead, I’m leaving gently, and reluctantly at that, and I can’t seem to just get over my strange sappy feelings about the whole moving situation.
For months, this space was my little corner of the world, as Yo La Tengo says in a song (and, God, I love that song so much. I discovered it years ago from the pilot episode of Gilmore Girls and I’ve loved it since). This tiny room was where I finished my bachelor thesis, mostly in a state of quiet panic, though on some weeks I did cry over it. I sat here and wrote my silly little personal essays and so so many poems. Cried a little more. In the late afternoons, around 4 p.m., strips of light would spill in; I’d take my naps and find peace in that temporary assurance that things would be okay. And some nights when I couldn’t sleep, I’d be staring blankly at my ceiling thinking, one day I won’t be spending my days in this room anymore. One day, I won’t be up late like this, staring at this specific ceiling, like this, in this room. One day this will no longer be a space I could call mine. One day.
I guess that day has come.
It’s strange—and almost pathetic—to feel this much over an empty room, but here I am. I stand for a beat longer, listening to nothing in particular and I’m not quite sure what I’m waiting for, but I just want to let the silence settle a little more. It seems the walls are starting to return to their original indifference when I first got here.
The room gives nothing back when I close the door. It’s not supposed to. Mio is waiting for me at the new apartment, blinking his one good eye, probably learning the outlines of a new room and a new routine that the both of us haven’t met yet. But as I think about him now—small, stubborn, trying his very best—it makes it easier to walk away, somehow. I suppose that’s the difference: I’m not just leaving a room for the sake of moving somewhere else; I’m going home to something that’s full of love, alive, and waiting. Maybe this is enough to start with.
