the things we pack...

I got a box -- six actually -- in the mail this week, belatedly from New York.

My boyfriend (whom I love and appreciate deeply for all the hard work he did packing) sent these boxes a few days before he finally got out of our apartment in Brooklyn.

Some had been hastily packed by me -- others by him.

For my part, what I decided to send, versus what got left was always going to be a bit of an arbitrary process. Some of it depended solely on what fit in the box; other stuff made it through simply because I didn't want it to get thrown away or end up languishing at a box at our respective parents house.

Still, having spent more than a month away from the things that I decided I needed enough to send them across 7,000 miles of ocean, I couldn't help but be a little shocked by the ill-fitting pieces of my life, as I unraveled them on the floor of my empty apartment.

There was an odd assortment of clothes, some long-missed, like my favorite blue dress, a purchase from a midwestern department store that always made me feel pretty, during the most dull and most Important of moments, a pair of well-worn pajama pants that are too hot for Guam anyway, a stained frilly shirt I am not sure what to do with, underwear, which is always useful. Others were less missed than aspirational: fancy shirts that I never quite had the heart to where while working office jobs in New York, which I will no doubt have use of in Guam, a vintage green 1970s top that I meant to put back in the Goodwill from whence it came, but did not.

There's my pair of laced up leather boots, which I really meant to throw out because who needs winter boots in Guam, but they remind me too much of Xena Warrior Princess, and days spent wearing torn stockings and inappropriate skirts to temp jobs to be able to do it.

There were books -- things I'd read (the book on SDS organizing in the 1960s, something on the philosophy of morality, a tarot book), things I haven't read (Mark Twain, Hunter S. Thompson, that really long book on racism that I've been meaning to get to) and things I will probably never read but wanted them with me no less (Ulyssess, a zine on anarchist organizing, an analysis of sexuality in Emma Goldman's writing -- I tried on that one, I did.)

I found the self-published 70s book on herbs (thanks Maxine) called "Let Herbs Do It", right next to the self-published 70s book on actual doing it found years ago on the dollar rack of the Strand (thanks Keith).

And lest any of us forget my propensity for self-reflection, there were the host of journals I have kept -- or at least the ones I have carried around with me -- in different notebooks, and in different hands as I have gotten older.

I found a blank notebook of Strand paper, which I used to lift injudiciously from the front desk when I worked there, the King Arthur baking sheet I got for my birthday this year (thanks again Maxine), which is much lighter than the actual King Arthur baking book that I had to excise from my luggage before coming here, and which I hope to be reunited with at some point.

And there were all sorts of papers in enevelopes -- collected over the years in lieu of journal entries, because, well, I'm prolific where these things are concerned. My favorite collection is a manilla envelope labeled: 'Shitty Corporate Temping 2004-2006', which is awesomely specific as far as titles go.

It's not like I've actually forgotten any of this stuff. It's all mine. It all shuffles around in the back of my head the way all the things we own do.

Now that I have it though, I feel compelled to do something with it, or add to it, and it makes me think of everything else I have left behind. And it occurs to me that it might have been easier had it all stayed in a box somewhere.

But then, things have a way of finding their way back to us, I think, until we are ready to let them go.