110
number twenty
In the process of moving out and saying goodbye. 543 words.
[NC]—Oh man, I hurt. It’s that kind of thing where the outside hurt and the inside hurt sort of hold hands and complete some existential circuit of full ache. I finished moving most of my house yesterday. I mean, with the exception of the things in the fridge, a plant, and a whole lot of garbage, everything has been loaded up into mom’s car and sent off to storage at her house. Everything else is slowly getting rammed into a menagerie of luggage to be hauled along with us on our long trek to the Mexican border. What is laying around me now are just the odds and ends: pillows and blankets, some pens, a toolbox, and other stuff that might or might not make it into the final cut.
Already, I am giving away things that I saved because I wanted to have them, not eventually, but right now. Things like my desk lamp, my clothes hangers, and this giant box of discontinued Kinko’s paper are all going to the first person who will take them, or the garbage, and any inner protest regarding the loss of things I love just gets swept up in that full ache.
It is hard to leave; again, in the inner and the outer sense. Tom showed up yesterday to help move what felt like two tons of cinder blocks and a desk to the back of, luckily, a two-ton truck. Nix was here the whole time taking pictures of the art that we have been drawing on the wall for years now. On the outside, I scraped and pounded myself (and Tom), heaving solid mass down the stairs and out the door, baked in the sunny day; and us both just already tired from a world of work this month. On the inside, Nix clicked away at an unfinished—but striking, still—art project that I thought I was going to get to enjoy for years; working with the certain knowledge that it would be painted over by the landlord once I’d vacated the premises. This inside feeling compounds in proportion to the things I take outside. I look around and every moment my home of the last, what, eight years or more, is wasting away to an unlived-in and vacant husk.
It’s hard, I see. I reassure myself that I take all of the great times and things with me in my little menagerie of mental luggage as memories, but the whole world of breaking down and shipping out is hammered home in this one moment when my pains align. While I have all along realized that it was gonna be tough and emotional to leave behind all of my friends, I forgot to prepare for seeing my home empty, undone, waiting for the last few blows to render it some landscape alien from the setting of all those things that happened here.
So, on the outside, I can put on a band-aid, and start hauling pretty good things to the side of the road. Phil, who buys me dinner and distracts me, helps me with this stuff that remains. Inside, Anne is sweeping up the last things before I leave, and I feel very little besides this even kind of hurt.
[NC]—Oh man, I hurt. It’s that kind of thing where the outside hurt and the inside hurt sort of hold hands and complete some existential circuit of full ache. I finished moving most of my house yesterday. I mean, with the exception of the things in the fridge, a plant, and a whole lot of garbage, everything has been loaded up into mom’s car and sent off to storage at her house. Everything else is slowly getting rammed into a menagerie of luggage to be hauled along with us on our long trek to the Mexican border. What is laying around me now are just the odds and ends: pillows and blankets, some pens, a toolbox, and other stuff that might or might not make it into the final cut.
Already, I am giving away things that I saved because I wanted to have them, not eventually, but right now. Things like my desk lamp, my clothes hangers, and this giant box of discontinued Kinko’s paper are all going to the first person who will take them, or the garbage, and any inner protest regarding the loss of things I love just gets swept up in that full ache.
It is hard to leave; again, in the inner and the outer sense. Tom showed up yesterday to help move what felt like two tons of cinder blocks and a desk to the back of, luckily, a two-ton truck. Nix was here the whole time taking pictures of the art that we have been drawing on the wall for years now. On the outside, I scraped and pounded myself (and Tom), heaving solid mass down the stairs and out the door, baked in the sunny day; and us both just already tired from a world of work this month. On the inside, Nix clicked away at an unfinished—but striking, still—art project that I thought I was going to get to enjoy for years; working with the certain knowledge that it would be painted over by the landlord once I’d vacated the premises. This inside feeling compounds in proportion to the things I take outside. I look around and every moment my home of the last, what, eight years or more, is wasting away to an unlived-in and vacant husk.
It’s hard, I see. I reassure myself that I take all of the great times and things with me in my little menagerie of mental luggage as memories, but the whole world of breaking down and shipping out is hammered home in this one moment when my pains align. While I have all along realized that it was gonna be tough and emotional to leave behind all of my friends, I forgot to prepare for seeing my home empty, undone, waiting for the last few blows to render it some landscape alien from the setting of all those things that happened here.
So, on the outside, I can put on a band-aid, and start hauling pretty good things to the side of the road. Phil, who buys me dinner and distracts me, helps me with this stuff that remains. Inside, Anne is sweeping up the last things before I leave, and I feel very little besides this even kind of hurt.
this happened to Mr. Cavin before 9:09 AM
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