Persephone's Poetry and Travel Blog

According to Wiki Answers, the term Nervous Nellie refers to horses that used to be generically known as Nell and that horses can be skittish and jumpy. Earlier on today I would have described myself as a nervous nellie, until I read up on the definition. I think, perhaps, sometimes some people use words for the wrong reasons.

I would have described myself as nervous, except now I think I might mean apprehensive.

Could I be an apprehensive Annie?

It’s quite silly really. Two years ago in February/March time my husband and I decided that the housing market was such that we could not afford to keep our property empty. We were both already working in a different city to where our first home was and paying bills on it had become silly.

It had been over six months since I’d lived there, eight since my husband had and we’d started to feel settled in with my mum in her home. So one weekend we travelled up there, packed up every single thing (pretty much boxed for when we hoped we’d sell) and got a friend to drive a van. Most of that stuff remains boxed up in my attic.

On the Sunday, as we drove away from the town we’d started our married life in, I dropped all the keys to the flat in with a rental agent. Since that day, I haven’t stepped foot in what I consider my first home with my husband.

We’d lived in other houses, renting, before we bought our flat and then got married. Technically, less than three months of living together in our marital home, my husband moved out to start a new job in a new city. Two months later, I decided that I’d be back with him by winter. It might sound silly when you get to spend every weekend with each other, but there was something about spending winter alone.

Without the man I called husband.

Within a few days of me making my decision and telling my boss, my husband rang me with a potential job for me where he worked. I started within weeks and moved in with my mum, husband and a foster child.

It doesn’t matter how little time we spent living there as a married couple. It doesn’t matter that we only ever decorated the bedroom and bathroom to our tastes. It doesn’t matter that the only furniture we left behind was that which we were happy to replace. It doesn’t matter that the first table, cooker, bed, wardrobe and sofa that we ever bought together is in the flat, all being used by someone else. It doesn’t matter that we can’t decorate my mum’s house.

What mattered then and now is that the property isn’t empty and I’m not forking out masses on bills for a place that no one lives in.

Except the tenants leave tomorrow and then, because the place needs a bit of work before new tenants, I will be visiting it.

And that is what I’m nervous, or apprehensive, about. My husband visited back in August and was appalled at the state of the bathroom and I’m apprehensive about… well, it’s the cleaning and the weirdness of being back in my home.

I miss it. I know I can’t ever go back there, but I don’t want to see the home I had trashed. I don’t want to see what I once had and no longer have. I miss my home!

~ Persephone M