Somebody told me the other day that moving is ranked up there with death in terms of the emotional stress it causes individuals. I couldn't agree more. There is something so unsettling about uprooting your home. No matter how tiny or overstuffed our apartment is, the act of trying to condense it all into meticulously labeled boxes and canvas bags--even just to move downstairs into the garden apartment--just makes me want to curl into the fetal position and cry silently to myself until i can go to sleep and wake up magically moved.
The trauma of moving for me involves the endless memories that resurface when I am forced to catalog all the beautiful crap I have collected throughout my life. The very first roses a boy gave me at 16 as well as the first rose Adam gave me--their petals all sickeningly smelly in a Bonne Maman jar. Valentines from the college boyfriend singing sweetly of my attributes when I was 20 years old. Polaroid of my old, lost friend Kendall, shit-faced drunk and wrapped in our sea-motif shower curtain, obviously saying something really deep into the camera but I can't remember what. Postcards I sent my family while I lived in France, each word heavy with the tension of our relationships. The box of my dad's life that I salvaged from my mom. A seemingly lost sympathy note from our miscarriage. It just goes on and on.
I think I save these objects that are so saturated in emotion tucked in secret places throughout my apartment (books, jelly jars, pottery pieces) so that I don't have one massive trunk of baggage staring me in the face. Instead I have it sprinkled all over my house. When I come upon a piece of it, I usually find it endearing and it gives me pause, but coming across a tsunami of memorabilia is amazingly overwhelming.
And while I truly feel so blessed it's just sick (I adore my husband, my daughter, my job, I'm healthy and so are those I love...how many people have that?), I am feeling a bit mournful for parts of my life as I move forward.
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