Instructions For Moving

Soon to be my new home

First there are the aches of everything familiar you will leave behind. The yoga studio where they know you by name, the grocery store you could navigate blindfolded, the patch of dirt across the footbridge where the prairie dogs squeak at the edge of their burrows in both terror and delight. 

Then there are the sticky memories that cling to these familiar places like grease in a well-loved kitchen. That notch in the pavement where your friend caught her bike wheel, sending her flying through the air, peeling back the skin of her shin like a banana when she hit the ground. The towering pine beneath which you kissed a string of different men goodnight one long summer only to creep up the stairs in the dark to the luscious silence of your own intentionally empty bed. The sharp curve of a two-lane road winding up the mountains to your basement apartment where you waited out lockdown, hand-sewn masks and all. 

Last there are the boxes. So many boxes. The first several packed neatly and labeled, clear tape folded at crisp right angles against the seams; the later ones crammed with miscellaneous books and jars, labeled simply “stuff,” a piece of crinkled tape slapped around the folds. 

Ten years and nine moves later, anyone would think you’d have this down to a science. Your belongings should obviously fit in one or two duffels. Art, shelves, anything indicating permanence seems unlikely to grace your walls. But every time a landlord hands you that key and you get a whiff of that fresh white paint, you crumple at the knees. You are overwhelmed with the thought: This time will be different. This time I’ll stay.

Within 48 hours, the walls will be neatly decorated in framed art and thin wooden shelves to hold the rocks and bones you can’t help but traverse around the country with. The fridge will be bedazzled in postcards and a pot of soup will be placed on the stove before the rental truck engine has had a chance to cool. You settle each new place with a speed and voraciousness that would give the average person vertigo. Every time, you are determined to make yourself a home.

Then you find yourself once again patching nail holes and cleaning baseboards after just a year in one place. You pack it up again. There are tears. There is hemming. There is hawing. There is maybe even gnashing of teeth. But these rentals, they’re never really yours, are they? Your parents, your bosses, they’ve forgotten what it’s like for “home” to be granted to you only through a thin, barely-legally binding piece of printer paper that each year must be renegotiated, never in your favor.

But it’s more than the leases held together with duct tape and cardboard scaffolding that send you flitting from home to home. It’s your partner and the people you share your home with, the unexpected layoffs which are abundant and the raises promised and rarely delivered. That rent goes up and your household income remains stagnant, or disappears entirely. Sometimes you are the problem. Sometimes you don’t quite fall in love with a place you were certain you’d fall in love with. Sometimes the insulation between walls is so delicate you can hear your neighbor sneeze, and you certainly hear when he plays an electric guitar through an amplifier at 3am. Failing to fall in love and living in ear plugs are evidently not compelling reasons to break a lease. 

There are a million and one reasons to move. So far you’ve found at least nine of them. As you dig through the garage in search of the can of touch up paint, you mentally make note of which box has the heavy cast iron soup pot so that it can be unpacked first when you land, yet again, in an empty, echoing house for an indeterminate amount of time.