It's moving time

31 weeks down
22 weeks left
(And this is where I usually talk about the diet. Well friends, the diet is temporarily on hiatus. 1) J was home and I ate lots and lots unapologetically; 2) I had visitors in town staying with me last weekend, during this week, and will have this coming weekend, all of whom require nice big dinners out and/or convenient bar food (things not on diets); and 3) I’m to the “eat it so you don’t have to pack it or buy more groceries” part of the move. Foiled frozen mystery leftovers do not a diet make. And so, this diet countdown will resume again when I have a pattern again, and am moved and have gone grocery shopping. Really, only about 3 weeks from now, if you can believe it. I just hope I don’t completely derail the progress I’ve made in the meantime.)
10 ish months until the wedding.

I am weirdly bipolar when it comes to moving practices. I can be both sentimental and simultaneously heartless. There are things that I have held on to for years and years as special and memory-filled that I will, when moving time commences, completely and without discretion or emotion just toss away without a second thought.

This practice happens pretty regularly for me, as this town boasts my LONGEST tenure (five and half years) and the apartment just previous to this one, my longest continuous residence (four years) since I left home at 18. I’m a mover. I get antsy. I like to look for new towns and new opportunities and new places to hang my hat. I have driven my share of moving trucks and have perfected the art of what one of my girlfriends calls “Uhaul moving-box Tetris.” (Think about that image for a minute. It’s practically perfect.)

At any rate, the point is that about once every three years (on average) I gut my earthly belongings and heartlessly toss previously sentimental possessions into the dumpster in the name of convenience or spring cleaning or most often, reinvention.

This move is proving to be an exemplar of this behavior for a couple of reasons. First, I’m moving from a relatively BIG one bedroom apartment with tons of closet space (three walk-in closets, one of which is likely larger than your first bedroom) to a relatively SMALL one bedroom apartment with very little storage. So just by shear square footage math, a goodly portion of my possessions has got to go. Second, I’m just sorta feeling moving-lazy this time. If I don’t *LOVE* something, it’s kinda not worth packing it and (more importantly) paying to have it boxed and moved, right? I’m becoming frugal in my old age (or, as I just said, perhaps it’s just that I’m lazy. But frugal paints a nicer picture I think. Let’s go with frugal.)

But probably the biggest reason I’m downsizing life (and quite frankly, the most exciting part of all of this as well) is that I’m getting ready to move to a small apartment (please please…from my lips to God’s ears) for a mere year, until J and I are married, and he is *finally* stationed in the same city as me, and we are *GASP* living in the same residence. Not just the same time zone, or area code, or zip code or town, but under THE.SAME.ROOF.

And so I find myself happily saying things like “I’ll not need to bring that with me. J has one of those and I can live without that for a year,” or “J’s is nicer than mine. So I can get rid of that,” or “J loves my fill-in-the-blank. Gotta bring that along for when we live together.”

These sorts of statements have made this move different from my others. I’m sure that every person on the planet who has made the life-changing step to move in with a significant other has felt this very same way. It’s time to start thinking about the sacred act of “the consolidating of the stuff.” But with that also comes the sacred act of “getting rid of the old boyfriend and bad juju memorabilia.”

First off, that portion of my life is officially done. No more bad ex-boyfriends or journals full of angst-ridden (and exceedingly bad) high schooler-type, unrequited- love poetry. I don’t need the pictures or the “love” notes from anyone but J. But more importantly, I don’t want to bring that into our new place. OUR new place shall be free from drama and the torment of our previous thirty-four years of bad choices. But how do you decide what's bad juju--what stays and what goes?

* * * * * * *

Well now, here’s something I’ve never done before in a blog post: a before and an after. It’s not unusual for it to take me a whole day to complete my thoughts for posting, but I generally stay on a pretty similar line of thought. The events that have transpired today have parlayed themselves into an interesting little corollary for the end of this post. Ha. Talk about being lent perspective.

So I was going to wax philosophical about how to choose the sentimental bits that stay and those that should be tossed, using some sort of hilarious bridget-jones-esque equation about the number of years you were with your ex + the number of years you’ve kept the “stuff” times the importance of the material (movie stub v. Superbowl ticket) minus the total amount of materials acquired divided by the severity of the break-up. And then I was going to suggest just setting fire to it all anyway. But today’s parable proved a more real (even if less hilarious) gauge.

In the middle of my writing this morning, one of my girlfriends came by to pick up some stuff of hers that I had and needed to return to her. We were talking about just this sort of thing, what to keep, what to throw, what was acceptable married people’s secretly stashed ex-materials, when I started talking about one of my very favorite and most sentimental items in the house. Everything started to be compared to that one thing, my most prized possession. And then I went to show it to her. And it was not where I had left it.

And thus began the frenzy. I turned my house upside down. And backwards. And forwards. And I cried. And I screamed. And just generally lost my ever-loving-mind. Every drawer was opened. Every container emptied and refilled. Every nook and cranny of my apartment searched. And in the process, every last piece of “should I keep this old photograph” type stuff in the maybe-pile immediately found its way into the large, extra reinforced, contractor-grade trash bags sitting all around my house.

That’s when it occurred to me that if I had to stop and ask whether or not it was important to me to keep, the answer was no.

And so into the trash it went, all those little baubles and keepsakes as I went searching for what was truly important to me. (Relax hippie-friends. I’m recycling and donating like a fiend also. I’m not just summarily filling trash bags. But you know my exes. And let’s be honest, there isn’t much of a market for old photos of those supermen, is there?)

It was interesting to me how quickly the question of “is it worth keeping” was thrown into stark relief. The answer, uniformly, was a resounding no.

I took eight trash bags to the dumpster today. I kept one small box of photos (not of exes.) I kept one small box of letters and cards (from friends.) I have one small box of everything J (all his letters and movie stubs and photographs.) And one small box in which I have stuck all my journals since I was 20 (if I ever die and someone finds them, I’m truly sorry for the age 19- 22 Sylvia Plath phase. Wow. Those pieces will NOT be my writing legacy.)

This time, moving time is not just about downsizing and purging and a fresh start for me. This is a fresh start for us. Me and J. Beginning our lives together. Starting the “what’s next” phase of life that we’ve both been longing for, for what seems like forever. This is it. I'm ready. Let's go.

And in preparation, I have to say, I’ve never been happier to take out the trash.