taming the chaos

I spent this weekend mostly alone in my apartment, trying to fit all my belongings into box-sized increments. It is weird, I am almost in denial that this move is happening. I picked up a bunch of boxes from SCRAP on Friday and they sat in the middle of the living room until Saturday morning when I forced myself to pick one up. I was completely overwhelmed by the thought of packing up all my stuff, and, like always, found myself paralyzed by the thought. "Just pack one box," I tell myself. "Just one." And I do. And the second box is easier. But after only four or five boxes, I am exhausted. 

I take breaks and try to get outside and do some other things with other people, but I am mostly doing chores. Dropping things off at Goodwill, returning birthday presents that didn’t work, gathering boxes from the liquor store and the grocery store next to my house, etc. At home, I put on old episodes of This American Life and work and work, hour by hour, putting everything I own into cardboard boxes, tape them up, and stack them in a corner. There is no real method to my madness, and I go from one room to the next unsure of how to tackle it all strategically. At the end of the day on Sunday there is a lot of stuff packed, but there are also empty boxes strewn around the room. I step in the empty ones to get through because there is no available floor space. "How the hell am I going to be able to work in this space tomorrow?" I think to myself. The ubiquitous clutter makes me feel so out of control. 

So I spend a half hour at the end of the night, after telling myself I’m done packing for now, stacking up the boxes in places that are out of the way, restacking the packed boxes to the corners and sides of the room, and by the end of it, my house feels tidier. More workable. Even cleaner, maybe, with all the stuff of the walls and most things in boxes. 

Eric has been strangely absent from my thoughts and life this week. He has been gone exactly one week and we’ve talked only once longer than 10 minutes on the phone. All our other calls have been short and vapid. I feel incredibly disconnected from him. I do not think about him at night when I am going to bed, counting down the days until he is here with me again (although he is coming to stay with me today and I would be lying if I said I wasn’t looking forward to it.) It feels like we are on separate planets. But I am not sure that he feels that separation at all, it just seems normal to him. Which makes me feel even more disconnected. 

I know that once he’s here it will feel normal again. That we will reconnect in our normal way and become tender toward each other. But right now it feels like he is a figment of my imagination. It’s weird, during our fight right before the zine symposium, I thought to myself for a second, "Wow, I feel so shitty that he is saying things to me. I want to call Eric and tell him about it." As if somehow the person I was fighting with was a different person than the Eric who comforts me and sticks up for me. But, they are one in the same. 

I keep waiting for a chance to relax. To kick back and maybe even go do something fun. But I have resigned myself to the fact that this summer is not fun. I mean, parts of it were and are, but a lot of it is work. The zine symposium and now moving. So many work conference and traveling. I tell Eric this and he tells me that it’s up to me whether it’s fun or not – it’s my CHOICE. This is the kind of thing that drives me crazy, like I have no right to complain about what’s happening to me or say that moving is a drag because I chose to do it, which I guess is technically true. 

I don’t know. 

I am just trying to go with the flow, tame the chaos.