Leaving home and leaving space

This is what they call seamless efficiency

I’ve gotten pretty nimble at packing and moving my life around these last 18 months.

After four cities and four apartments, you start to get a steady hand at sorting things into boxes

I’ve weeded out my inefficiencies and dispensed with my nostalgia for tiny bits of paper and ticket stubs, streamlined with Tupperware and left behind what couldn’t keep or be kept up.

After my futon quit in Chicago I bought myself an air-mattress and never looked back. It gives that J.C. Penney “bed in a bag” concept a whole new meaning.

I’ve been putting off buying a real bed for years because I don’t like how a box spring weighs you down. I don’t want anything in my life that’s so hard to maneuver.

There have been good and bad places in the last year and a half. My favorite apartment was the stately brick house in Charleston with the huge maple tree, where my roommate and I would watch old copies of the Wall Street Journal crumple in the fireplace and stay up late for public radio jazz on the weekend.

My least favorite, the squalid studio across from the liquor store with the refrigerator in the bedroom and the walls grubby from the dirty coal trucks rolling down Beechurst Ave.

I had lovely roommates in some of those apartments– ones that kept me up all night talking or scheming up secret humorous blogs or watching Marx Brothers movies.

For a while there was also Chocolate Milk, the precocious beta fish that made the trip from West Virginia to Chicago and who died on Casimir Pulaski Day (just like the Sufjan Stevens song.)

I’ve found that your stuff stays pretty much the same from place to place, spreading and turning to fill different spaces. It’s everything else in life shifts during transport.

I’m packed again and leaving all those places behind me, just like the careworn red leather love-seat that’s stowed in my parents’ garage until I have space for it again.

How will apartments, roommates, jobs… happiness shake out? Well, those are the ‘known unknowns,’ if you will. At least I know I’m well-packed with some space saved for whatever needs to fit next.

I was young when i left home
An’ I been out a-ramblin’ round
An’ I never wrote a letter to my home
To my home, lord, to my home
An’ I never wrote a letter to my home.

-Bob Dylan

This entry was posted on Friday, January 29th, 2010 at 9:51 pm and is filed under wisdom. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.