The Moving Boxes

When Sergio got a job at a design studio in London, he was thrilled. Then he started packing up his apartment in Madrid and realized how much stuff he had. Books, plates, a guitar he never played, twelve plants and three cats: Luna, Pancho and Mister Gato. After two weeks, he had filled forty-two boxes. His sister offered to take the plants, but the cats were coming with him.

His new home in London was what the British call a flat. In the photos, it had looked bright and cozy. In real life, it was on the fourth floor of an old building with no elevator, and the living room was smaller than his old kitchen. The movers carried the boxes up the stairs one by one, and by the end of the afternoon they had taken over every room. Sergio could hardly open the front door.

The cats loved it immediately. Luna disappeared into a box of sweaters, Pancho climbed on top of the tallest pile, and Mister Gato hid somewhere and refused to come out. Sergio spent his first evening looking for him and his second evening trying to put together a bed from a flat-pack store. The instructions had no words, only drawings, and at the end there were six screws left over. He decided not to think about it.

Unpacking turned out to be harder than packing. Every time he opened a box, he had to figure out where to put things, and there was never enough space. He gave away half his books to a charity shop, threw out a broken lamp and sold the guitar online. Slowly, the piles got smaller. Then the hot water stopped working, so he called the landlord, Mr. Patel, a polite man who promised to sort it out the next day.

When Mr. Patel came round, he looked at the cats, the remaining boxes and the strange bed. "You've been busy," he said. He fixed the boiler in ten minutes. Then he noticed a small noise coming from the wall. They both listened. It was a soft, angry meow. Mister Gato had squeezed behind the kitchen cupboards and couldn't get out.

It took an hour, two screwdrivers and a whole can of tuna to get him back. By then, Mr. Patel had stopped being a landlord and become a friend. He stayed for a cup of tea, sitting on box number forty-one, and told Sergio the best places in the neighborhood to buy bread and fix bicycles.

That night, Sergio carried the last empty box down the stairs and put it out for recycling. Back upstairs, the three cats were asleep on his bed. The flat was still tiny, but for the first time it felt like home.