For the past couple of weeks, I've been homeless. Unemployed and homeless. In fact, I'm currently unemployed, homeless and crashing with my parents. [Chandler Bing voice] Could I BE any more attractive?
At the end of last month, I packed up my apartment -- everything but my laptop, purse, two suitcases and a small bag -- and put my things in storage. Several times as I was packing, I wished that I lived a more ascetic life. Why couldn't I be the kind of person who doesn't need material goods? Why on Earth do I have so much stuff? And where, for the love of Christ, did it all come from?
Yet I had pared down, I really had. Or at least it felt like I had. I got rid of chairs, books, clothes, CD racks, pots and pans; but still the packing didn't end, and the boxes towered over me.
I do, I'll admit, have a lot of books. Call me a Luddite, but I like books, actual physical books with pages you can turn. Since I used to work in publishing, a lot of them are in hardcover. Maybe I haven't read all of those books, but I have every intention of reading each one ... someday. Yes, even A Man in Full. (Maybe.) And so the books took me days to pack, me with my Sharpie and my tape gun, until the boxes climbed halfway up the walls, covering a good chunk of my living room, and I looked at them and felt sad for all the things I've meant to do, but haven't yet done.
I also have a lot of kitchenware. Perhaps, as kitchen consultants claim, you can get by with a pot, a pan, a wooden spoon and a few good knives. But I love my Le Creuset Dutch oven, I cook everything from roast chicken to green beans in my cast-iron skillet, and my aluminum saucepan makes me swoon. Plus, you always need wine glasses, and Tupperware, and casserole dishes, and serving dishes, and a rolling pin (which I have never used), and an ice cream scoop (ditto), and ... um ... custard cups. Do I actually need all this stuff? Probably not. But would I want to live with only a pot, a pan, a wooden spoon and a few knives? If I'm being honest, I don't think I would. (Maybe, I concede, I don't actually need the custard cups. Though I have used them, to serve nuts.)
Then there were the boxes of old work, shoeboxes full of random cables, files crammed with bills, tax returns, sheets, towels, vases, pictures, DVDs, curtains, hats, scarves, family photos, duffel bags and purses, old cameras I can't seem to throw away. It doesn't seem like you have that much, when you're sitting on your couch surrounded by it. But the older you get, the more you accumulate things, like a wave picking up water as it speeds toward land. Some of it you keep out of sentimentality, some out of need; some because it makes you feel like a grown-up (look! I have placemats!), and some because you're lazy or indecisive or optimistic. In the end, they're just things. But sometimes they're hard to let go.
When the moving was done, and the storage space was full -- a 10x10 room crowded with boxes amid which my couch teetered on one end and the TV looked at me accusingly -- I gazed at all my stuff and felt weird. At first I thought, this is my whole life, right here in front of me, contained in this one little room. Then I corrected myself: This isn't your life. It's just your stuff. You could walk away from all of it and never look back, and would you really miss it? Is this the life that you had, or the life that you own?
I know it's the latter. It's all just some junk I accumulated through the years. But as I sit here in California, living just fine out of a suitcase, unfettered by possessions with a world of possibilities ahead of me, some part of me can't help but feel that my life is 3,000 miles away, packed up high in a little room.
