another suitcase in another hall

The endless cycle of emptying a house, throwing all my things in boxes and bags and piling them on a vehicle to be chucked somewhere else, does get less painful and less emotionally taxing every year - I barely feel very much, strangely enough, at leaving this house which has been such a home to me over the past year - but (of course there’s a caveat - that’s life) it doesn’t get any less annoying! Every year without fail I wonder anew how I accumulated so much STUFF - every year I throw away two garbage bags full of junk and still have too much to fit into the boxes I own.

I think, this is ridiculous, I should just throw out the entire contents of my drawers without even looking at them, since I haven’t actually looked at them all year and I’ve got on just fine. Then I paw through the pile of stuff, and I find myself slowing down, I find a card or an envelope catching my eye… I open letters, I reread them, I flip through old diaries. And I think, no, I could never throw all this out.

I just realised you never wrote me anything. In your own writing, that is; emails there’ve been, but never a card, never a letter, never a note, never a sentence - never a line to accompany gifts, never a word otherwise. I’ve almost forgotten what your handwriting looks like. It’s weird, isn’t it, when you think back on all the years we’ve known each other?

Another year, another shoebox, another bridge to cross.

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