Substance and essence

Dear Diary, It's been seven weeks since my last confession. I feel spent. Everything is good, but nothing is right.

Once swallowed the piece of paper lodges in her oesophagus near her heart. Saliva-soaked. The specially prepared black ink dissolves slowly now, the letters losing their shapes. Within the human body, the word splits in two: substance and essence. When the former goes, the latter, formlessly abiding, may be absorbed into the body's tissues, since essences always seek carriers in matter — even if this is to be the cause of many misfortunes.

Thus begins The Books of Jacob, by Olga Tokarczuk. This is the first book I opened in my new home. 

I have opened many books since then. I am unfocused.

I still put store by the significance of firsts. I considered which friends I would first welcome here, the first champagne we would drink, the energy that would fill this space. The first painting I would hang. I am sentimental about the first lover I have yet to bring to this home.

I harbour other superstitions. (Since when am I such a fool?) The keys were a sign. As I pulled them from my purse that first time, the chain pulled apart, keys clattered, and the Moroccan tassel fluttered to the floor. I don't know how I got in that first day. I have a million and five keys for this house, and only two of them fit one of the locks. Later that first day, I managed to snap the key to the basement door, still in its lock.

I have been beset by a million and five setbacks — mortgage complications, tax miscalculations, delivery delays, lost shipments, miscommunications. Any one of them is a barely perceptible glitch, but together they cause interference, a disruption; they give cause to take pause, reconsider the foundations. 

I am reading, but very little. I have cast some sculptures and am eager to clear a studiospace. I am on an 824-day streak of German lessons, but my heart is no longer in it. I still work too much. I still engage in real estate porn, to reassure myself that I made the right decision. 

Things that are missing:

• My hotel-brand bathrobe, I'm sure I saw it amid the bagged blankets, but they're essentially all unpacked now
• The spare set of stone-carving tools, the ones in the cloth roll-up bag that I thought I could take to workshop because it wouldn't matter if any of them were inadvertently borrowed (maybe I took them that one day, maybe they were borrowed)
• A mailing tube containing Polish poster art, including one for Verdi's Makbet, or was it Don Giovanni, I remember pulling them out of the closet in the old place, now I have wall space for them and they're nowhere, was the tube thrown out with the disassembled boxes 
• Romance, the ordinary kind, it doesn't have to be literary or heroic  

I still feel like an essence not fully settled into its carrier, perhaps because the carrier is not clearly defined. Remnants of the previous owner linger; my essence is confused by them, grazes past them, hesitates before setting down.

This home is vast and drafty and quirky, it needs my labour and love.