Moving... Again

Yann found something therapeutic in the disarray of his belongings being slowly packed up. Every item was organized into unplanned piles, either to be boxed up or pruned from his possession. Spread out across his hardwood floors, the sum total of his life measured in mass was meagre and by and large, utilitarian and modest. But of course there were also trinkets of sentimental value like the cracked wrist watch his grandparents gave him when he started second grade. He was new at school and the watch made him feel older and beyond the fear of standing in front of a foreign classroom. If he were to be buried in the hot ash of a volcano and preserved with his possessions for a future archaeological discovery, he wondered what conclusions they’d draw as to how he lived, since they’d know how he had died. 

 Yann found himself after being lost in contemplation, clutching the cracked watch, and appreciated how these baubles laid out before him could tether him to the past. He told people, “Moving is a drag because you have to lug your shit to the next destination,” and he meant it. But Yann also enjoyed the act of turning out the heap of things he had amassed and feeling how these nostalgic tethers had guided his fate. Not all were bound to benign memories. He turned over in his hands a silver dollar that he had declared his lucky coin one forgettable day. But the coin was with him the day he had his heart broken for the first time. He had turned the silver dollar nervously in his pocket between his fingers as he waited for a text message. Not two days prior, he was invincible and alive. When she finally texted back that her interest in Yann had run its course, the coin weighed heavy in his pocket.

 To be bound to the past was not to repeat it. Yann viewed these talismans as incarnations of his wins and losses. Each tribulation allowed him to impress this value on something that was otherwise worthless. And for all the material common in one's life that Yann had not yet gained, he likewise lacked in wealth. Every move required him to take only what he could carry and wheel with his luggage. The sad fact of this meant that Yann would frequently throw out some of these enchanted things in order to keep his load light lest he risk becoming over encumbered. Each item was up for reevaluation upon every packing, and sentimentality can cheapen over time. There was no system; whatever made it through the filter on one packing day might not make it on another. Once Yann had marked an item for the trash, there was no going back, it’s power was already lost. Despite the physical loss, Yann liked to believe that the hard fought lessons and morals of the stories these things told would remain with him. He imagined that he could finally absorb them into his body or soul and that is how he rendered them finally inert.

 And so Yann would pack his things, taking careful stock of what stayed with him, and with what he parted ways. He would go onward toward his next locale and encamp himself for the next series of days, weeks, months that life would bring. And he liked to think he didn’t repeat the past, that he had learned from his history as he navigated the treacherous shoals of the future. But he would never know for sure.