Move-out check-in

I'm moving out of the apartment that I moved in to almost two and a half years ago. This is the longest I've ever stayed in one flat. I was in my college apartments each less than a year, then in the place in Bologna for a couple months. The only places I've stayed for a longer time were the three houses I lived in with my mom.

I'm making good progress through the stuff and items that I've accumulated in drawers and shelves; but now that it's out from under the piles, the furniture itself is glaring at me. And beneath the furniture, the empty apartment. When I first started the program, before I'd fully moved in down here, before the furniture was delivered, I came down to get the internet set up and take a class conference from the new place. I sat in the corner of the dining room on the floor next to the modem trying to get it up. The room was empty besides a few boxes of radios and fans (I've now donated the fans to a vintage shop and shipped the radios back to my dad). I covered that empty space with all these things I carried here with me, but it's being revealed again as I take them away. The space wasn't mine when I got here, I made it mine, and now I'm unmaking it again. That the furniture is too heavy for me to move by myself made me accept the way it was; and once the art was hung it stayed where it was. But now I'm leaving, and the place will become somebody else's (the rental company arranged two viewings today).

I'm comparing this to my situation leaving undergraduate. I finished the Master's over a month ago, and I got an email yesterday saying my diploma was in the mail. It's really over. I have more prospects now than I did when I finished undergrad. I sat on the stoop of my apartment there, overlooking the courtyard, and reeled in terror as I watched the rain. That whole summer frightened me, because I didn't know what to do next. I feel better now than I did then. I now have more projects where I work with other people: that makes me feel more legitimate. Before I was striking out truly on my own. I'm also older and more experienced: there are many people doing many things, and no one of them is right. My family is supportive of me; they've been through it and deserve a break too. I'm going back to doing what I was doing before I came to Chicago, before my mother died. I'm different than I was before, more myself than I was. I've grown up, some. I'm excited to see how this goes.

I've come mostly to the furniture, as I said, but there's some difficult possessions left. I looked at the wooden letters (clowns and silly birds) that spelled my name on my bedroom door as a child and decided to keep them, along with the wooden train blocks shaped like the letters of my name from the same time. I blew the wooden train whistle with my name on the side and the locomotive that says "toot toot" and heard it in my soul. I blew that whistle so many times as a child the end grew gummy from my lips and saliva; today I saw the marks in the wood where I scraped off the yuckiness and the discoloration still in the wood from my breath. I miss my bear and blanket (baby bear and label). They went missing in a hostel in Vienna right before the Toki Pona meetup in 2022, and it's still hard to sleep without them. I hugged the whistle to my chest and felt so young.

I'm getting to the part of the breaking down that's hard and slow. Part of it is that I'm tired. I pressed on the project through January, and now I'm feeling overwhelmed. This week I've been sick (sore throat, congestion, fatigue, bodyache) and sleeping poorly. I've been getting up late. I got confirmation from my father that the vintage radios I shipped him arrived. I had packed them up first, or nearly first, and only shipped them to him last week. After I dropped them off at the parcel service I sat in the car overwhelmed. I couldn't move; I could hardly sob. I was still. Now they're where they were off to. My mother ended up with them when she and my father separated in 2006¹. Now they're returning to him. That was their relationship. My mom and dad were Jean and Marc, who divorced. Sometimes it happens.

Or moving to Chicago: I'm now clearing out my life here. There'll be some storage left, though some might go down to NC with my cousins. We'll see. The furniture's also unknown, whether I want to keep it or not. The art, too, will go in storage here. I might pack the lot in a shippable container I can get sent to me anywhere. I'd like to minimize what gets put in storage, and absolutely irreplaceable things (notebooks, pictures, writing, records, nostalgic items, relics, pieces of information I can't get back) take priority. The rest can go.

I was sorting the box of my mother's scarves I took from her house and hardly wore to keep the ones I really wanted, send the nice ones as a gift to someone who wants them, and donate the rest. I found some of my mother's hair on one of the scarves (incidentally, one I decided to donate) and put them in a plastic container to keep. I wrote a label for the lid, since otherwise I wouldn't know what they were. I thought I'd passed such attachment, but I couldn't let go of them.

So that's where I'm at.