Dear Diary. I am on the umpteenth trip between apartments. Umpteen is a real number, by the way, the number when you have taken so much stuff from an old apartment to a new one that you are ready to throw all your suitcases and all your belongings into a river.

You don't understand. You think the process of moving house involves a moving van, and possibly two big men called Dave and Steve to load and unload the van.

We did have a moving van, a couple of days ago. But we only paid for the two men (Carlos and Santiago) to take the heaviest of our belongings - a mattress, bookshelves, a chest of drawers, things like that. And the rest of our stuff? For some reason, I'm moving it myself, by making lots and lots of trips with two suitcases. Every day I make trips between the old apartment and the new apartment, bringing more belongings over. Every day I make these journeys. I've long ago stopped asking why we just didn't pay for the movers to take everything. All I do now is just keep going.

There’s a restaurant in front of me and people are sitting on seats on the tables on the pavements, and it blocks half the pavement. There are more people queueing next to the restaurant, blocking even more of the pavement, and suddenly I realise that none of these people matter. They’re basically just 1s and 0s in the matrix of the universe. So I shout, “Get out of the way! Get out of the way!” and I run with my trolley and suitcase and I knock over an old man. I knock over a woman. There’s a man with a baby. He doesn’t even try to get out of the way, he just stares at me with an open mouth like a fucking idiot. I knock him over and his baby goes flying into the sidewalk. I don’t care. I don’t care anymore. I just keep running. The next thing I know, I’m on the floor and I’m being held down by people. I can hear the wails of police cars. Then I’m being questioned in a cell, and they’re showing me pictures of the baby dead on the floor, its skull smashed in, and they’re asking me don’t I care about this baby? It’s a silly question because babies don’t do anything. It’s like asking me if I care about old people. I just sit there, vacant. I’m just looking into nothing. They just lock me up in an asylum because they think I’m insane. I spend the rest of my days in a padded cell with a straightjacket on.

*****

Now it’s 6pm. I’m still making trips back and forth between the apartments. I think I’m near the end now, or if not the end, the beginning of the end. Every fibre of my being is dedicated towards the one task of moving every last one of our belongings to the new apartment. Girlfriend has taken 3-year-old to the playground I have no distractions, and I’m like a machine now, a machine designed to do nothing take objects from one location to another. I’m more machine than man. I grab stuff, chuck it in the suitcase, and I wheel it over to the new apartment in a suitcase.

A bead of sweat rolls down my forehead. I pass a group of teenage girls and one of them wolf-whistles. I don't know if she was whistling at me. If she was, then it's the first time anyone wolf-whistled at me since I was 13.

In my head, I imagine myself like the man from the Coca Cola advert, the window cleaner. But in reality, I’m more like a hobo dragging his belongings behind.

There’s freedom in doing this menial task over and over. It frees your mind from any other responsibility or worry.

I’m possessed by the idea that I can have everything done and moved before Girlfriend and 3-year-old get back from the playground. It's an impossible idea. An impossible dream. But every man needs a dream to keep him going.

It’s like the final stretch of a marathon. I can feel the endorphins in my body, causing euphoria. I’m getting faster with each trip. 24 minutes, then 16 minutes, then 14 minutes. If I can keep this up, I should be able to accelerate to the speed of light and escape the universe pretty soon. Maybe I’ll be able to travel so fast I’ll be able to fly around the world and turn back time, like Superman did, and stop us from ever moving in the first place.

Then I get to the new apartment and there's 3-year-old on the floor, playing with his toys, and it's all over. The dream of having everything moved by today comes crashing down. There will be no more trips today. Now it's time to read books to 3-year-old and make dinner.

But we still have three more days to move our stuff. Maybe tomorrow I'll have moved everything, I think wistfully. Maybe tomorrow.