on moving out (8/28/25)

i. notes
The summer air is whipping all around us in its speedy retreat, and the dragging tailwinds of its evasion come afterward as Autumn steps forward to deliver that stiff uppercut final blow to August. It is all shockingly hasty: gusts often come to exceed twenty-five miles per hour, to whip my hair about and make me look ugly at a time when I have far less leeway to look ugly than before. And Boston is dominated by flocks of moving trucks, confusedly ambling this way and that across their new city, and Boston is dominated by towed electronic signs instructing those cross-eyed newcomers not to take their wandering trucks onto Storrow Drive (they are too tall for the low-hanging bridges overhead, they will be mangled by them). My apartment is, in kind, dominated by moving boxes, and by spaces at one time adorned with furniture and wall-hangings and fully-fledged beds — I find it funny, momentarily, that I best know the place I have ostensibly lived at for a year in this unflatteringly stripped-back, disorienting halfway-state of “moving.” Or rather, it is not actually disorienting — I am just saying this to myself because I feel it should be — but it is (again) the state most familiar to me: I moved in, slowly finished my unpacking, and then spent the better part of the ensuing year never seeing my “completed” apartment as I instead slept in other people’s beds. I would occasionally return, if only to drop by for a change of clothes, to wash my hair, or to deposit sentimental baubles with a small inventory of possessions, one which I growingly acknowledged I would never pay much mind to until I was packing them up and leaving again. As I did when I was tearing them all down this weekend. And now I can no longer sleep so regularly in another person’s bed. And now I am slowly packing, moving out, abandoning here forever — a place I never gave too much regard, I think. So I am not sad to do this, and I resist the obvious self-relevant metaphors present in it. I am putting these things in boxes and then I am putting these boxes in boxes and then I am putting these boxes in a storage unit to keep them away for the time being. It is no more complicated than that, sparingly. My thoughts on the matter are lobotomized.

Though how strange it is to be leaving a place with such little emotion! My history of a concurrent running-away/expulsion from the childhood home, followed by a spiteful and roving abandonment of what boring towns I took up refuge in afterwards, my grand emancipatory departure from a Virginia fraught with personal tragedy, and at last the harrowing emergency break-out as I fled a lover-turned-ex’s apartment to sleep on other people’s floors all last summer; these plot-point installments in my personal mythos inform a habit of greater turmoil to tie up with the simple act of departure. I never leave a place so peacefully as this, my apartment in Cambridge, which is basically nothing. I struggle to find its subjects appropriate for a resounding emotional response, but there is no instrument here to drown out the other sounds of my life. Whatever I would let my mind arrive at inevitably fell short. I do not think I will actually miss the “vaunted” drunk walks back from the bus stop, because they happened only infrequently — when I became drunk I would often take to sleeping at another’s house instead, so these returns were not often enough to warrant any of my great concern — and I do not think I will find enough respite from my current ambient-annoyance roommates to demand any of my great relief. There was never enough time spent alone here to construct a tale for it. I never wanted for there to be. I had better things. Tepidly, I suppose I might enjoy the ceaseless amenities of my future Allston — or at least as compared to the residential sprawl and truncated business hours of my current town. But this turn hardly asks for more than a smile; allegedly, there is more to a life than bars which keep open past midnight. So instead I decided to make a strong policy out of this overbearing apathy, in hopes it might drown out the more pressing subjects of my life all the same as another weepy melodrama would.

I have a friend with whom speaking to is sometimes just the same as speaking to myself, because she knows the very same things I know, or wish I knew. This mirroring presence can agitate in me a definite forward momentum, enough to build the escape velocity which unencumbers me of my otherwise more circuitous thought processes (this greater speed makes it less concerning to me that all of my advisors seem to reach such similar conclusions to my (eventual) own, yes-men all?) An example: in conversation with this friend about two months ago I found myself again getting ahead of what I would ordinarily divulge in my internal dialogues, this time speaking tiredly about living in my contemporaneous corpse of an apartment. Frankly, I wished to see it gone, I was filled with a sudden inexplicable spite for all fractions of my life and could not wait for any amount of departure from it — Oh my God, do I think that, is that why I am so paralyzed here? I panicked, she concurred. Though my apparent spark of vitriol felt so scandalous to my traditional appraisals (rather, non-appraisals) of the apartment, and it, of course, quickly subsided among the banality of brown cardboard boxes and rooms with no furniture nor wall-hangings. I could not figure out where it had come from, but no matter: I could still smell the stale rot growing and whatnot, at the corner of Allston and Brookline streets, chafing against myself soon to be living more loudly at the corner of Allston and Brookline towns — I just always wish I were living in my nearest future. And our lifestyles had diverged after all, myself and my local fragment of Cambridge, and this was a place I had only come to bereft of any better options following last summer’s more conflagratory breakup: this is what I tried to tell myself in order to further blunt the still-inherent emotionality of moving out, to lean into my newly-realized apathy. And of my future, my “lifestyle” — I told my friend of these in words frighteningly precise, or more precise than I would allow myself had I not been supplied a surrogate face to say them to. I spoke words of my own route to being “published” and “released” and having my work “seriously engaged with,” having “self-agency” someday, is that what I want? I suppose it must be. I often want worse things, anyway, and regardless I was then pleased by my rare fit of honesty.

There is another obvious metaphor which I am presently averting my gaze from, though this somehow too obvious for any meaningful resistance: I pass a dead rat on the now-daily returns to my apartment. I see it slowly decompose and disintegrate, and probably some city maintenance employee will one day have it properly disposed of. That day has not yet come. I despise the dead rat every time I see it: do you know nothing of subtlety? I shout. For my street to be dominated by metaphorical death as my apartment, and the apartments of most everyone I know, are literally dying while we all move out of them; that level of blatant symbolism is too overbearing, you could not even write it without those of us so-refined by a proper taste for obscurity in all things turning up our noses. I cannot hide from this reality. Unfortunately, any method I might’ve once been able to deploy against this stupor of distasteful unsubtlety has seemingly abandoned me; though often in my more distant past, when there was an obvious metaphor I sought to resist (such as this), I would’ve assigned my ever-active thoughts to dissecting a more neatly impossible subject. So it was in that house, that dead childhood house in Northern Virginia which I was expelled/ran from, which my mother would always threaten to kill herself in amidst her broken marriage and fearful/resentful children — there I kept myself from thinking of my own personal crises, I used her own winding pain and her pain inflicted upon us to distract, and aspired instead to unravel what defects in her life must have rained down to bring about such a violent character. It was during this time, too, that I reached my deepest internal repression — both sexual and psychological — yet still announced to myself: I am resolved! Or, if I were not resolved, I at least had far more immediate and mortal concerns anyway, and the frivolities of introspection were unneeded — dangerous, even, my siblings required more present physical protection from her. This narcissistic, self-soothing quest in which I was the singular hero was how I avoided coming out to myself for over a year, it was how I stayed unhappy as a darkened figure unaware of any life outside my home and inside myself. I think about this personal habit with regards to my mother specifically because I am now riding the city subway’s Green Line, which the green-siding apartment building I will soon move to is abutting, and I am wearing a flattering green shirt in order to accentuate my figure to the public and the pretty woman across from me has a tasteful green handbag, and I am here avoiding the familiar stripped-back empty apartment and its now so-exposed faint green walls; green was my mother’s favorite color, and I suppose it is mine too. But her faded memory cannot distract me now. And I know far better than to completely hide from my thoughts of the present disasters, anyway, better than myself then and better than her. So this must be a matter of personal taste in literature, then. I am simply moving out. I think enough has been written about heartbreak and breakups and all manner of failed romances, but not enough has been written about just mindlessly placing your things into cardboard boxes. I am simply moving out. I am simply moving out:

ii. my essay on moving out
1 bookcase
1 nightstand
1 desk chair
1 desk lamp
1 television
1 mattress
1 electric guitar + amp
1 stereo
2 pillows + a bedsheet
4 posters
45 CDs
    2 of which are not mine
8 DVDs
5 casette tapes
6 vinyl records
~40 books
    ~10 of which on loan from a friend
3 boxes of needles + syringes
2 vials of estradiol valerate
15 journals from 2015-2025
3 sketchbooks
2 binders
4 bags of clothing + hangers
    some of which are not mine
3 pairs of shoes
2 laptops
1 broken cell phone
3 cameras
loose papers
and various mementos from our past year
    some of which are not mine.