Bad Habit

Your mom calls you and asks how packing is going, like she knows you're not really packing at all. You tell her it's going fine, and sigh, and say talk to you later and can I borrow some money for the Uhaul.

You are packing; things are not in there regular spots, but not much has made it into boxes. You just move one thing from one place to another. The two decks of cards sitting next to your bed you move to the kitchen counter, all the stuff in your medicine cabinet gets moved to the bathroom floor. It's as if you are stirring up the contents of your apartment, like your life is stew.

Today your cat jumped out your second story window. Once you realized what had happened you looked down to the sidewalk below but there wasn't anything there. No dead cat. You think it probably feels great to feel like you want to throw yourself out of a window and then actually do it. You wish you were a cat.

The hard part about packing is the distractions, the pictures you run into, the horrible things that you wrote and although you think to yourself I never want to see this picture or read this again you throw them on a pile, that will at some point be moved into a box. You have trouble letting go. Which leads to the other hard part of packing, realizing that there are far too many things in your life and not enough people. You wonder how one person could have seven bottle of lotion, three of them specifically for your feet, and still feel so alone. You throw away the rainbow feather boa you got when you went Pride weekend with your brother and wonder why you saved it for so long. What did you think you were going to do with it? Wear it? Where? The next time you went to Pride? That was your first and last Pride weekend. You remember the poem you wrote about it, the big wooden crosses, and the gay boys that told you you were beautiful. Maybe you should have gone to Pride again. Everything you attempt to put in a box is attach to a memory that is neither good nor bad but exists even if you wish it didn't or even if you don't care if it does or not but it makes is so that picking up that one thing, that singular object that is a token or talismand from some piece of your life is like pulling a dead insect out of spider web.

You entertain the thought of throwing it all away. Starting over. Like it will make you a different person, like you could run and jump without this sleeping bag full of junk. Because that is what it really is--junk that has been inject with a syringe full of sentiment and that is a drug you are trying to quit. Sentiment is sloppy. Cats aren't sentimental. They turn their back on you with out question, they throw themselves out windows with no hesitation. Sentiment holds you to the ground like a sticky syrup full of sugar making that fling, that leap, that fall, that freedom, impossible.