After I got to Leila's home in northern Maryland Monday (yeah, I'm a couple days behind--I'll try to catch up), I was forced to confront the most difficult physical manifestation of this cross-country move I'm doing. That's right: The sheer amount of stuff.
I've never been one of those people who could pack light or get rid of things. I'm not a hoarder--I'll get rid of newspapers, (most) old magazines, clothes that don't fit. There are no jars in my apartment of my nail clippings or errant hairs. But when it comes to things like books, pictures, even kitschy old gifts, I just can't bring myself to divest myself. I keep thinking things like, So-and-so gave me that, it means something to me since so-and-so is now living thirty gazillion miles away.
I also blame my mother in part for this, too. She used to get fed up with the state of my room (she called it "messy," I called it "organized chaos"--you know, the kind where nothing's where it belongs per se, but you can find stuff because it's where you expect it to be. To me, this was a perfectly acceptable state of affairs. Not so to my mother. So she would take an entire weekend and basically sort through every piece of paper, every piece of clothing, every single item in my room--and then put it in a place where she thought it ought to go. (I don't think she ever read my diaries or journals, but she definitely made sure she knew where I was keeping them. My sister, on the other hand, would pour over them, usually with a couple of her friends.) Most of the time during these "cleaning" binges, the piles of things to be thrown out would often become simply enormous, often outstripping the piles of things I got to keep. And, of course, my mother was the final authority on what should go into which pile.
But the real reason is that I think I'm like this goes back to a moment during my senior year of high school. I came across a photo from my freshman homecoming dance with several friends, including one girl who'd been like a big sister to me. She was a dear, dear friend, but after she'd graduated the year before she'd kind of dropped off the radar. I went away for the summer and even though I'd called and called when I got back, I never heard back from her. The photo had melted to the glass or something (hey, it gets hot in the desert, especially in second-floor bedrooms where the air conditioning doesn't work properly) and I didn't talk to anybody in the photo anymore, so I thought, What the hell, and I threw the photo away. A couple of months later, her mother called to invite me to my friend's baby shower--turned out she was six months pregnant. About two months after that, my friend was killed in a car accident while still pregnant. When I got home, I just kept thinking that I'd have given anything to get that picture back.
So here we are, and I am basically incapable of throwing away anything with an iota of sentimental value. Which makes moving ... a real pain. Most of my stuff is in a storage unit back in northern New Jersey, but the rest of it had to fit into my car... my teeny, tiny little Honda Civic which, after owning a Jeep and an Oldsmobile Aurora, is sort of like moving from a 4-bedroom house to a studio apartment. The trunk is full to capacity. The back seat has about three inches of wiggle room total for all the stuff that's back there, and that was before I even put in the bags I'm using on my trip: Clothes, toiletries, computer, papers, purse, shoes. All this stuff ended up in the passenger seat. As for me, my knees keep bumping against the steering wheel and my elbows get cramped.
Now, here's the rub: Somewhere along the route of this trip, my dad is meant to join me on this trip. That's right, my just-shy-of-six-feet-of-father will supposedly want to have a seat in this car (ideally he'd have the back seat so he could sleep, but realistically the passenger seat is the best he'll be able to hope for.) He'll also, one can expect, will bring a suitcase of some kind. This means I have to ship stuff home to get it out of my car, and that I have to do something much more difficult for me: Get rid of stuff.
When I got to Leila's, I had to start bringing things from the back seat into her house. I was planning to drive down to Baltimore to stay with my friend Katie, and I figured it would be easier to bring stuff into Leila's house, where you can indefinitely park on the street right in front, than into Katie's place, which is on a narrow one-way street with no parking allowed. I did leave a few things in the car, though--mostly, things to ship back to California.
The shipping of boxes is one thing. Even with flat-rate boxes, that's still $17.90 per box, and I think I've spent over $300 on these things so far. I have gotten onto a first-name basis with people behind the counters in the last couple post offices I've gone into, and the people in the local Baltimore post office have seen me five times in the last two days. And the worst part is, I still don't know if I've gotten rid of enough people to fit my dad and his bag.
Then there's the other thing: Getting rid of the stuff. I like my stuff. It's what helps me feel like I'm at home no matter where I go. At yet ... now I have to drop it because there's nothing else to be done.
All of which leaves me with one overwhelming feeling:
This is tough.
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