Boxes
I shoved everything into boxes as best I could. My dad made the “fake strangle” hand gesture to my landlord, aimed at me, and then we lifted some more things downstairs. It was a hurried day, pure labour, impossible to remember fondly or even at all. We moved boxes from one place to another, and sometime during the day we ate club sandwiches. We remembered to breathe and nobody sliced their hands on anything. For all my admiration of asceticism, my ceaseless railing against waste and calls for renouncing material objects, it took hours to clean out the closets, and my new closets are stuffed to their breaking points. Days will pass, I’ll move more bags to the curb and breathe again. I’ve changed my address in a thousand places, learned how the heater works and when to water the plants. Soon, maybe I’ll meet the downstairs neighbour who practices the piano at night.
Writing feels forced. I’ve been busy: there was the move, some travelling for work, lots of decisions, and a new routine in a new place. It’s a new year and my life is changing. I’m spending more time in front of a computer than ever, and seeing less of people. Computers can be tools of communication, instead of isolation, but my relationship to them has become businesslike and transactional. Information is not knowledge, and knowledge is not worth much anyway. I’m trying to read more attentively, take care of myself better, feel emotions as strongly as before. My world has shrunk and so has my awareness. A local event comes and goes, my opinion rises and falls with it. Rants seem perfunctory and the news follows the same patterns. Of course it’s foolish that they’re renaming Avenue du Parc, and everyone but the mayor can see it. Castro is dying, Bush has ceased being a cowboy, and everyone has forgotten about bird flu. The world is just as scary and troubling and fascinating as ever, but I’m content to let it pass by for now. Friendships haven’t ended. I miss the conversations and gulping down the last beer we shouldn’t have ordered, or the grandiose plans that we know will never be. In the meantime, I’ll unpack boxes and string cables into sockets and eat take-out, and wonder how everybody is doing.
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