Moving in and Collapsing

As opposed to my last post, I am no longer numb. Today I moved into my new apartment and I am fragile, a welling bubble of emotion that is contained by a thin, cracking glass dome.

And I know by typing this, I will shatter. It will be brief and I will pull it together, but I need to get this out of me right now.

So today we moved me. MS was there, along with my folks and my daughter, her boyfriend and bestie. And it went on without a hitch. I had to scramble for a van, but we were done moving in about three hours.

After that, my folks stuck around and we went to Target and they helped me along ridiculously kindly, tossing in a huge heap of what I needed as a new startup like I was an 18-year-old moving out for the first time.

What struck me was that the move - even with the scramble to find a truck and the picking up of my daughter's boyfriend and the physical exhaustion of up an down and stairs - was actually way easier than my parents taking me shopping (they wanted to put in on my new couch but I'd already bought it, so they offered a necessities trip to Target instead).

At first I figured my thoughts and feelings of borderline breaking down in the middle of Target were just me be being worn: all the physical and emotional exhaustion after moving out of my own house. But I think it was something more.

If you do moving right, it's procedural, systematic. And in my case, it's just moving my stuff from one place to another locally: load up, drive, load out. There is comfort in comfortable things, even if it's just something in a box you can't even identify without opening it, and with something like a bed, it's a swaddling wonder of ease in familiar.

But shopping, shopping after a split sucks; you're just shopping, sure, but you're buying all these items that you need to restart your life - a spatula, pots, and condiments and Swiffers, all these items that remind you with every pickup that it's gone. Forever. You are picking up pieces that have been lost, rebuilding something built and now missing, a structure with half its bricks missing.

And somehow I just wrote that and didn't lose it, though I've been on the cusp all day. Perhaps I passed it buy like on a carousel and I'll be back. Perhaps I'm just too tired to deconstruct tonight. Or, perhaps, the simple act of writing this depressurized the dome.

I still expect it and will for months and know it will happen more than once, but I think for tonight I'm okay to grab a beer and put on Netflix and breathe.

Always: breathe.