My heart is a little tender tonight. I’ve just begun the packing process and aside from finding enough boxes for all those books and spooky dolls and Romulan Ale (thank you Kathy) there’s also the need to let go of things. Â Things and stuff. I have the memories so the actual things are not
necessary right? Purging the books is hard but made somehow easier by the kindle and tablets we carry with us everywhere. They aren’t as pretty though, and I miss the covers. And the smell.  I miss bookstores and libraries and that thrill you get from bringing home a stack from either place. Shopping in the kindle  store isn’t the same by a long shot. We just have *so many* books and moving them across the country again is expensive. Even if we media mail or maybe palletize them.  And I’m not sure Em will fully share my taste in books. I hope she will which why there are so many still that we’ll take.
Books aside, harder still has been letting go of cards and letters, notebooks and papers. Love letters from O or R or M or even S and smutty stories I wrote way back when I thought I might be another Anais Nin.  Christmas cards and letters from friends here to me when I was so young, mohawked and living in San Francisco. And all those notebooks on Shakespeare, Chaucer and Marie  de France. That other life when I thought there might be a way to be a Medieval Lit professor. All  those papers. All those A’s. And that unreachable dream.  And finally..so many years later most of them are relegated to the trash heap. All that work, all those memories.
Business cards from my first tech job, one of the best ones  and from the pinnacle as an IT Director for a very cool start up right in SOMA. I’ll save one or two of each.  All those accomplishments, all those memories. Keep the cards, let go of the cabling design and sub netting  calculations added to a quickly sketched map of a new office that I designed.  That server closet was pristine.
I feel a bit adrift, a bit like I’m not sure who I am. I’m not who I wanted to be or who I was. This time in my life has been envisioned so many different ways.
This place, this liminal place I find myself isn’t bad, isn’t wrong. In so many ways it is good and content. It is and is not disappointing.
Tomorrow I’ll be able to see the adventure again, tonight I see dreams piled up in yellowing notebooks and tattered christmas cards .
Whoa, hold on. You’re PACKING??? I didn’t think you were moving for another couple of years?!