moving on (moving day)

i moved recently. and it sucked. my old and new places are only about a mile apart, in the same city, and easy enough to drive between, but any time you have to pack up all your belongings into boxes, devise schemes for the removal of large furniture from your narrow-doored second-floor apartment, clean two years' worth of cobwebs and dirt from corners and floorboards, and then unpack everything in a timely manner lest you piss off your new roommate, your life is going to be a stress-filled hell for a little while.

compounded with all the typical moving hassles -- scrounging up boxes, organizing your stuff as you pack it up, deciding what to keep and what to get rid of, getting rid of stuff (donating clothes and books), scrubbing floors, sanitizing the fridge, painting the walls, renting a U-Haul, all in 90-degree weather -- was an unforseen emotional burden: memories of the past, of past relationships, of one in particular which was intimately tied to my former place of residence.

memories which had laid dormant in the back of my mind were stirred up along with the dust in the process of sorting through things, cleaning out drawers, and uncovering forgotten items. painful, bittersweet memories.

i suppose it was not to be unexpected, if i had sat down and thought about it. i was bound to be confronted with the various objects i had accumulated from him and not already destroyed or come to peace with. and for the most part, i think i dealt with it OK, taking the miscellaneous post cards and small gifts i came across in stride. i was amazingly able to part with things, too -- a new and welcome advancement in the moving on process. a post card from DC, glass marbles from a wedding, sticker from a march, cotton from NC, even a valentine's day card were all discarded without much of an afterthought.

but what i wasn't prepared for, what i couldn't have forseen, and what ultimately ate away at my steely resolve to pack in an efficient, business-like manner, were the memories evoked not by physical manifestations of his presence in my life, but by the impressions and events left in his wake -- which i could not simply discard in the trash. while packing up my disorderly accretion of pills, taping boxes shut and assessing which medicine was duplicated, expired, unlabeled and therefore useless, i was reminded of one time when he came to visit and i was sick. he arrived with a neat, orderly collection of pills, each kind compactly allocated in film canisters, with the name of the drug from the original container cut out and rubber-banded to the canister. such a simple gesture spoke volumes of his caring thoughtfulness, of his desire to make me feel better. and yet, where were he and his damn pills now?

later in the moving process came the anger. to be fair, he was not the sole source of my acrid bile -- there was eric, my landlord, for being so irresponsible about renting the place and giving us short notice to finally be gone; there was yvonne, my former roomate, for not doing her fair share of the cleaning; there was me, for not allocating to yvonne more of the cleaning. and then there was him, for not being there this time around to help. his sweat and labor adorned the place -- he had carried boxes of my stuff, carted items over in his subaru, painted the trim of my walls. i cursed and cried as i scrubbed and daubed. where was he now? why had he left me alone, abandoned me? here i was suffering, and he was off happy and content in his life without me.

the dusty memories had been stirred.

i wish i could say they have settled by now. but they haven't. i don't know if it's just going to take some time for things to calm back down, or if other external factors (seeing him and his new girlfriend together for the first time, lab going poorly, settling in with my new roommate, things not going great with matthew) are blowing them around, keeping them suspended in the air, in my mind. time will tell.

but i've moved, more or less successfully. and it's time to keep moving on.

strings attached

flipping through the pre-programmed radio stations in my car tonight on the way home from the grocery store, my ears were drawn to a song on one of the poppier stations on my dial. it had a nice guitar part and the singer's voice had a pinch of talent -- rare things for pop radio these days. i began listening to the lyrics and it was something pitifully trite, of the sort "i can't live without you..." (seriously, it was something like "I look at her, but she doesn't know how I feel about her...") and it hit me that love is and is not like this. or rather, it can be, but it doesn't have to be. you can (and do sometimes) let yourself get all worked up over that girl who won't return your affection, or you can move on (and probably don't often or soon enough) to someone more attentive to your attention.

and i'd just like to say here that it's not like i expected love to be just like the pop songs on the radio make it out to be. there is some verity to them -- that's why they're at all popular (marketing ploys aside). you don't hear too many songs about gastric colitis or what to do with your second billion dollars earned from your dot com start-up in part because these don't define a common human experience shared by a significant portion of the population. but love and heartache and heartbreak are such a common ground, and so we peons can relate to the ordeal we imagine to be at the root of our pop stars' emotive love songs. but not having had a genuine experience with love until i was well into my 20's, i had some misconceptions (and here hollywood is probably to blame as well) about how it was supposed to be, how i was supposed to feel, and how he was supposed to react.

i've since learned (since the end of my total naivety about 2 years ago now) that love is a complicated, complex beast. it's as if you have thousands of tiny strings attached to you; these strings are fine and transparent, like the strings attached to a marionnette. but they are also attached to others -- those you encounter in the game of love -- and you get pulled in so many different directions by different people at different times, or by only one person, or by several people at once. similarly, you are pulling on other people's strings. sometimes it is without you knowing it, other time you are intentionally tugging at their strings. it's a tug-of-war, and you win when you find a string being pulled equally and strongly in the opposite direction.

i used to get quite worked up about being pulled about; i was like a floppy, spineless rag doll, who let herself get yanked in the direction of whichever string happened to be taut at the moment. further, i used to be stressed about pulling others' string unintentionally, or that i had any power whatsoever over others' strings. now i accept my strings: that i am pulled, that i pull. and i've learned to control the pulling to some degree. it's kinda fun sometimes to get yanked into a brief free-fall, or to see how hard you have to tug to get the other person to notice. i don't get too upset over strings that break or pulls that go unnoticed or strings you can't quite get a good grip on. que sera sera. it's all for fun, until that tug of fate comes along...

because afterall, they're just strings. they're not a part of me, who i am. sometimes it hurts when the strings break, but they don't damage or alter the essence of the attached marionnete puppet. and i am that marionette puppet. except with a sturdy spine and no-strings-attached independently functioning legs which can kick the shit out of (or at least run away from) any self-proclaimed pupeteer who thinks he can play with my heartstrings. kinda like pinnochio. except i'm cuter and you can't tell when i'm lying.