Moving, Part I
Now I know at least part of the reason I've been avoiding packing. It's too close a cousin to death, this looking around, knowing I'll never set eyes on again.
*
There are good things ahead, to be sure, but they're just distant enough to slip from the foreground.
*
I think I'm beginning to understand the nature of "stuff." It's one way to externalize what's inside--give it shape and heft--make it real. One way to exercise dominion over space. What more startling visual for the great indifference than an empty room? So you accumulate these things, these abstract effigies of yourself, and no matter where you go, there you are. Bye-bye blank stare.
*
Maybe people didn't need as much stuff to create the illusion of constancy when they stayed in one place most of their lives.
*
I don't have much stuff, and between thoughts I'm throwing more and more of it away. Old bills, expired prescriptions, coupons I'm never going to use. Valueless things that are nonetheless physical manifestations of the life I've lived here. Down the trash chute they go. Like bits of straw the wind shook from a scarecrow.
*
How many times during an argument did I stare down the patterns in this rug? It isn't mine. I wouldn't want it anyway.
*
At some point, I realized I'd held on to so little I was living like a perpetual guest in someone else's home. Someone with enough stuff to colonize the moon. He'd accumulated all these things, these abstract effigies of himself, and no matter where I went, there he was.
*
. . .
