I am packing tonight. If you count the times I moved in and out of my parents’
house (three summers in college and one 3 week stint in the fall of 2011), this
will be my 14th time packing up my meager adult life since I moved
to New York for college, six years ago this month. I will use the same suitcases
my parents bought me then: big, black, and anonymous, just like I wanted. I
will use the same packing process I did the other 13 times:
1.
It is always at the last minute, and it always
reveals that I have so much more crap than I knew. Why did I not immediately
recycle the flyer for the graduate school picnic? Or the planner from the year
before? Why do I insist on keeping that one navy dress with pockets that I
didn’t like that much when I bought it 3 years ago but might be exactly what I need for some undefined-but-not-impossible
future occasion?
2.
It is never not at night and never unaccompanied
by music. Silent packing provokes too much anxiety, like the time the night
before college graduation when I was more stressed about packing than I had
been about any of my final exams and almost had a panic attack. My friend Brian
stayed up with me til 4 am, tightly rolling my every sweater, scarf and sock
into submission. Thanks, Brian.
3.
It never fails to illuminate my intentions and
how wildly unrealistic they turn out to be. Every time I move I discover that I
have saved notebooks full of classtime scribbling, apparently planning to
return to them in my spare time -- perhaps curled in an armchair, ruminating
anew on the Schlieffen Plan or Derrida. As if I wouldn’t spend that time
watching the Daily Show instead. Notebooks go, almost inevitably, into the
recycling pile.
The one notebook I have held on to
stubbornly is battered and green. It has a lot of notes from the GRE prep class
I took almost 2 years ago. But it also has one feverishly, exultantly scribbled
journal entry from April 2010, which I wrote on the train from Edinburgh to
London as the sun set over wild crags and placid sheep, and the green hills
were so green and the blue sky so blue. My handwriting was dreadful and my
rapture complete. There is nothing like being alone on a train in Scotland with
“Colorblind” streaming through your earbuds. I am covered in skin. No one gets to come in. Pull me out from inside.
I am folded and unfolded and unfolding
I can’t get rid of that one.
4.
There are lots of other things I just must keep, in addition to the green notebook and the navy dress. I pack them in my
boxy suitcase, and I unpack them somewhere new. They are my favorite symbols of
the pieces of my life, and with every move there are more of them:
a.
The box that Katherine made for me at the end of
my senior of high school, the box whose lid showed a map of upper Manhattan and
an excerpt from Oh the Places You’ll Go. I always set the lid carefully on top
of the box, so the inside is visible, its walls and floor a carefully compiled
collage: me with my four dear and beautiful friends, in elaborate costumes and
faded leotards, in our post-Nutcracker party outfits, dancing our way through
middle and high school, dancing and laughing and discussing Harry Potter.
b.
I always put the doll Jessica made for me next
to the box - a small white doll
with yarn hair, complete with tutu and ballet slippers, that represents one
favorite role in the Nutcracker we performed every Christmas. My Doll doll. The
last tutu left to me.
c.
The 50 or so postcards that sit on my desk, still
imprisoned in rubber bands, which I fervently collected during my study abroad,
the cheapest items at every gift shop we haunted from York to Cardiff. I
planned of course to write on them all, documenting my impressions of each place
and the funny things that happened there: when Calvin and Cameron and Kellen
tried and failed to make a human Stonehenge; the time on Brighton pier when
Anna was almost attacked by a vicious seagull in the middle of smiling for a picture;
the magical moment at Jane Austen’s home when Kira sat down at the small
upright piano and played that one song that accompanies all the best moments of
the 2005 version of “Pride and Prejudice.” We walked around enchanted while she
played.
I have kept them. They are
blank. I love them anyway.
d.
The box my sister Julia made for me in ceramics class, the
one that captures all the dearest loves of my quasi-cosmopolitan, pre-Utah
life. One side for our house in Albany, complete with welcoming red door; one side for
the Eiffel tower, whose city I spent little time in but will always cherish for
the best ice cream I’ve ever eaten and every moment spent inside Saint-Chapelle;
one side for the Empire State Building; one side for Big Ben. All the places
that have welcomed me onto their streets and made me happy and taught me stuff.
e.
A subway map that has hung in every room I’ve
paid rent for since I left New York, reminding me of the years when my dearest
Leslie was an 11-minute, 8-stop ride away from me always, ready to get falafel
and discuss every minute detail of our lives. And a little desk
lamp I’ve had since I moved into my triple room at Fordham University six years
ago. Affectionately dubbed the Lomp (the Lo-lamp) by my roommates, who endured
its oddly searing light in their eyes way too late into the night, it has
illuminated many many hours of lucubration – but was also witness to all the
best things about college: the many finals-induced dance parties; the uncontrollable
laughter at 4 in the morning; Joe’s potatoes and Brian’s birthday cakes; Bonnie’s
sleeptalking; Cecilia’s raptor walk; Amanda’s astonishing ability to be photogenic and funny at the same time; Katryn’s
parabola frowny face; Keely’s love for the number 18.
f.
From my 22 months in Utah, I have more books,
thanks to my adventures as a graduate student in English. I have all 5 seasons
of “The Wire,” although I have yet to watch the last and when I think about it
I worry about Omar and McNulty and Kima. I have a small white piece of paper
that reads only, “Dear Laura, f*ck the haters. Love, Lydia,” from my third week
of grad school during which a retired former electrician in my writing class
accused me of immodesty and inappropriate behavior in a paper he turned in to me. I am keeping that advice from Lydia,
because sometimes it is the best advice.
g.
Oh, and I have a picture of my fiancé, Jamie,
next to my bed.
And that, I suppose, is why packing this time, despite the
same procedure and the same stuff and the same memories, feels —
not the same.
Because in 11 days, the guy in the picture is going to be my
husband. Because when I take my big black suitcases out of this room, I will
take them to our one bedroom apartment in Salt Lake City, into which we will
move when we get back from our honeymoon. Because I am choosing to take all of
my baggage — literal and, I
suppose, figurative – and combine it with his. Because the next time I move, I will be we, and we will probably have a lot more shit.
I can’t wait for our apartment. I can’t wait to take walks
in our leafy neighborhood and eat pizza in our seventies-era kitchen. I can’t
wait to take naps on Sunday afternoons. I am impossibly glad that I get to love
Jamie until and after all his hair falls out. I am staggered and moved and intensely
grateful that he plans to love me until and after I am wrinkled, lined and flabby,
especially because it would be an historic medical mystery if he were to ever
join me in flabbiness. There is actually no one in the world who makes a better
half of we than he. I can’t wait to
pack and unpack with him, all over the world, for always.
But my map, my Lomp, my doll, my memories: I’m glad they’re
coming with us.
