Or A Bit Like A Bird Stealing Bread Out From Under Your Nose

I am in the living room, my mother sitting a mere ten feet from me listening to love songs On Demand. My headphones are wrapped around my head, battling the outside noise, shamelessly pumping love melodies into my brain.

Right now, right this very moment, I wonder if she realizes that we are both united, and therefore instantly separated, by the same feeling.

There is something about packing, which I’ve been doing for the last two days days. We’ve had boxes neatly folded on the floor for about two weeks and plans buzzing around our heads for about two years and it occurred to me on Saturday, as a blizzard raged on outside, that it was time to begin putting all of this shit away because our storage space lease was to be signed on Wednesday which was, at the time, three days away and our apartment had to be turned in by Friday, which was five days away, because we are now leaving in mid-March, which is an eternity away.

My life has inconveniently been reduced to a counting game recently; I am inconveniently bad at math, meaning that I am now bad at both math and life, but good at run-on sentences.

Word on the street says that there is another storm hitting the skyline tomorrow (today?) through Wednesday; 10 to 20 inches of snow, more numbers to interfere with a carefully thought out moving strategy.

There is, therefore, something about packing while it snows that inspires copious amounts of sentimentality or, at least, this is my current theory. Spurred by the surplus urgency left over by intense procrastination, I set about tearing down this room and the kitchen so that most of their respective contents now rest in a pile of boxes I pushed under the table and to the side. I was surprised by the sheer packing efficiency I have developed; part of me, the part that references unicorns every once in a while, wants to attribute it to an obvious disposition for moving, one that will never keep me in a place for too long, one that will keep my life teeming with excitement.

The more realistic side understands that the discovery of this legitimately marketable skill is the product of four moves in eight years. This is the fifth one. And I need stability, because some nights I dream it, and that's how you know.

It was emotionally exhausting, this time. Mainly because I kept finding her all over the place. No, no, it was because it was snowing outside and I was packing up my life once again. I found a certain friendship bracelet I took off a while ago due to deep disillusionment. I didn’t know what to do with it. Throw it away? Wear it? It went into a box. I'm still not sure why we keep the stuff that we keep, storing it in containers as we somehow still carry the implications.

I should have thrown it away.

I had to pack shot glasses, mementos of boozy afternoons that began at 2:10 on the dot, the creation of a relationship, the last night she ever spent at my place. There was tea in the cabinet. Why was there tea? I don’t drink tea. Oh yeah, because she brought me crackers and Gatorade and tea that time I got food poisoning and held me even though I was sweaty and probably smelled like vomit. There was a Christmas present with our names etched on the metal, back when we were just best friends.

There are pictures, there are scarves, there are tuna cans, there is underwear, there are books, there are shirts, there are pens, there is your non-existent number in my phone, there are cigarettes.

And there was snow outside my window. The snow makes me sentimental.