I’ve been packing up my life in boxes and garbage bags. It’s so small and insignificant and none of it means anything. Are our lives just collections of things? Discarded words on hand-written pages that even I will never read again. Clothes that don’t fit anymore, broken suitcases, play jewelry that I’m too grown-up to wear, a hat. The sum of twenty-nine years. Is this all? I’ve taken some misguided pride in my minimalism, some sense of great generosity in giving everything that meant something to me away, but now? I’m moving in two days and I feel like I’m leaving myself behind. Because I can’t find who I am to pack it up and tuck it into the trunk of my car. It’s like I never existed at all. A once friend might have given me a slow, reassuring smile and told me that I was merely in a liminal state. But he’s in the past now, with everything else soon to follow. The truth is that I’m scared.
Forgive me this self-indulgence. Once, I told a friend that now was the time for becoming. I was right, but yet a little early. Now. Today, tomorrow, the next, and the next, and the next. The days unfold ahead of us and they are ours. Our days and what we make of them. That is the sum of our years, not the things that we have when the time comes for counting them all. Things must remain meaningless. Actions, those are the important things. And words. No doubt I will wallow a bit in this feeling of loss and fear of all the unknown waiting for me, because these feelings prove I am alive. I will face the impending future, and I will make of it what I may. And the important things I will share as easily as if they weren’t important at all. Never mind the accounting.
So long to the familiar. Tomorrow is another day.
