Moving house

“Pray that your loneliness may spur you into finding something to live for, great enough to die for.”
-Dag Hammarskjold

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5 September 2010, Chicago, IL

There's a crackle-stretch sound of packing tape, last of the roll, unwinding at high velocity; higher pitched now than at the beginning of the dreary-wet moving day, growing ever more plaintive as the boxing up and moving out continued.  This is the last of the carrier boxes, and those have followed the last of the furniture and the Orphan (for now [and maybe for always]) wonders, as she looks around this sometimes-home, how she's accumulated so very much stuff.  So much that it takes a few school friends -- bribed, promised libations and foodstuffs -- and a truck to move her belongings from one Lake View flat to the next.

She wonders when it was, exactly, that her life outgrew the boundaries of what she could manage on her own.  Not everything will make it from this place to the next.  She's already taken bags to Good Will, boxes, too.  Exchanged some things superfluous for things now-needed.

Gone is the futon that laid on the floor for so many years.  Gone is a stack of old school books.  Gone a few knick knacks given as housewarming gifts by well-meaning classmates, things that had gone directly into boxes and never grace the thinly-decorated bookshelves.

Gone is the mentor/lover she had in the Winter. Gone is the friend/mentor she had in the spring.  Gone is the maybe-mentor who offered in summer.  The mercurial boy who found her by the moon-lit lake.  The Akashics. Both of them.

There'd been a lot of leavings of late, she thought to herself, hefting the box to carry down on her own.  There's a ritual to this: last one out turns the lights out, closes the door, says good bye to the flat.  Emily is the last one out.  Locks the door for the last time.  Turns the keys in to the Super.

She's left no forwarding address with the building's attendants.  She changed her mailing address at the Post, at the Uni.

It's been a wet and awful day to move, and by the time the last pizza is finished, and beer has been drank down to dregs, and the school friends abandon her new-flat, by the time all of the filling-up people have left, it is dark.  And it is quiet.  And there are muddy-wet footprints to wipe off of the wood floor, and boxes to sort from one room to the next.  And when it's all done, the sorting, and it's all through, the move, then she lights a small fire in the hearth and sits down on the floorboards (forsaking the couch, and even his rocking chair) and watches the crackle-flames dance for awhile.