Another

I pluck my belongings from various parts of the living room, harvest them like a selective gathering of things. I do this so I can add yet more to my ever-crowding 8×9 room, and so Arica and Juan can have free reign to continue packing, cleaning, arranging, stacking. I take my iced quad grande breve vanilla latte first, followed by my cell phone in my pocket, further followed by my Jesse James dvd, my Kingdom of Heaven dvd, my There Will Be Blood dvd. I take the triangular stand for my papers. I take an unedited, discarded printed book manuscript. A newer unedited version sits in the back of my new car, under the hatchback of my 2008 Hyundai Accent. A second trip to the living room and I gather my digital camera, the camera cord, my briefcase containing no less than three various book manuscripts and a day planner and medical documents and loan paperwork and co-pay receipts and attorney contracts, an old philosophy text, a collection of atheist philosophical writings, a copy of GQ, and a smaller black hard-metal box containing my Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulation unit prescribed to me by my doctor, and dispensed at a Walgreens. I used it for the first time last night, and came to the conclusion that it was of poor judgement for me to actually move around with four electrodes of pulsating electricity strapped to my back, just to have a cigarette, because one of the pads came off of my Arizona-sweat induced skin, and I tried to put it back on, and burned my finger with a high concentration of juice. So it goes.

A step in my room would reveal a dismissal of the current state of affairs. The rest of the house is boxed, bare. My pictures still adorn my walls, my Ikea lamp hangs from the ceiling, a portrait of Justin has not moved from my printer atop my dresser, my black leather curtains still are blown by my floor fan. DVD’s are still stacked, as are hangers, and my hookah from Jerusalem still sits in the corner unused, next to my Buddha from China, shot glass from Vegas, shot glass from Portland, shot glass from San Diego. I am refusing to pack, but by day’s end I will be done, a testimony to the small space and minuscule accumulations that have not made their way to my current residence. It doesn’t feel like I’ve been here a year. But it has been a year since I sat in a cold and empty two-bedroom apartment, the last resident out of four. The last resident after my boyfriend and I broke up and he moved (months later) and Amanda and Ben had headed for some place new.

But now that boy and I are back together, and I am still with my friends and roommates of the last year, and I move yet again on the terms of another. But not back in with the boyfriend yet. Some day. Ideally. Soon. Not yet. Maybe the long-awaited conclusion of the moving-every-year storyline will come to a happy reality. I want it to be with my boyfriend of almost three years, I want it to be in Portland. That is ideal. But 2008, like the years before, have not always yielded dreams and goals to complete fruition, but more like tastes, like crumbs, and I am hungry for the whole fucking pie. I am tired of the crumbs. Maybe I have to make the pie myself. Still figuring that one out.

But I will wrap my life into some boxes once again. I will, once again, stack my car full of crap and put books on religion, the Middle East, travel, into boxes. And I will once again drive but a few miles to remove such boxes. Always sticking to the fucking desert in summer moves, always sticking — forcefully — by sweat, and never loving every minute, but waiting patiently. Oh so fucking patiently.

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