We awoke on the mattress on the floor. We still had a few boxes left, but most of our belongings were already bubblewrapped and tightly stacked up in storage, or discarded if deemed unnecessary. I walked around declaring, “I am no longer attached to material things.” I marveled at just how much stuff I had accumulated in the past 5 years, wondering exactly how we had fit so many objects, shoes, clothes, and trinkets, into just 750 square feet.
I also marveled at just how easy it seemed for Frank to compartmentalize emotion as easily as he could compartmentalize our household supplies into boxes. And I wondered why I felt like my emotions – apprehension, confusion, excitement, fear, frustration, despondence – were spilling over into every crevice of the apartment, one with the endless clouds of dust that had begun to coat the insides of our nostrils and tear ducts during the week.
We began sweeping the dust particles in earnest, only for them to multiply and fly around in defiant protest at being disturbed. I wrapped the last of our plates, cups, bowls, and glass water bottles. As I wrapped, I imagined wrapping myself up, too, into the tightly wound congregation of bubble wrap and tape, and also putting myself inside the box with “FRAGILE! HANDLE WITH CARE!” written on all four sides in permanent black marker. I felt like I would break at any moment. The only solution was to keep “doing stuff.”(Is this the only solution to the endless confusion of existence, the apathy, the lethargy, the inertia? To keep writing to-do lists, to keep “doing stuff” until we run out of “stuff to do?”)
We drank kombucha, a shower beer, and a half-finished bottle of ginger ale. No actual food. The lonely last remaining blackberry white claw (from a late night/early morning – 3am- 4-pack impulse buy during our final Big Night Out last Saturday after our leaving party), I emptied into the sink. A strange concoction of probiotics settling in the stomach added to the disorienting nausea of leaving our home. An eerie emptiness settled over me that had nothing to do with the space in my stomach from not properly eating real meals over the course of the last week.
Next it was time to go to the storage unit, where we would be leaving the last of the boxes containing the wrapped utensils, The Holy Vacuum, and various prized and less important last minute miscellaneous items. We were passing them on to Frank’s younger brother. (Is this all that we really do as living beings? Pass on things – items, knowledge, stories, problems, emotions – to each other – until we run out of “stuff to pass on?” until our “stuff” becomes someone else’s to carry?) The folks at the storage unit the day prior had needlessly reminded us with a pointed finger and a raised brow, “absolutely no getting frisky on the premises.”
Bewildered, we agreed, “that won’t be a problem.” I wondered to myself with a shudder, had people really decided, we just have to have sex in this storage unit, right now!? That just seemed to me, to be, not only wildly unsanitary, but also wildly unsexy. When we dropped our items off and alerted the same people we’d spoken to the previous day in the office that we were finished, they spoke to us through the plexi-glass, masks on, gesturing a thumbs-up. “Someone in there has hantavirus?” Frank asked, laughing nervously. Maybe someone had got it due to “getting frisky” in the storage units. Hantavirus was all we’d been reading about on news sites and instagram meme accounts alike the past few days. Another sense of frenzied panic was yet again taking over New York (while writing this story, NYC had moved on to the terrors of Diarrhea Lettuce). I’d told my best friends jokingly (but also I guess semi-seriously, who really knew), that if another pandemic hit, I might just want to end it all. At that point, I might just believe Higher Powers didn’t want me – or anyone else navigating (re-)entering the current job market for that matter – to thrive.
Now, onto something that kind of did make me feel like life is worth living: witnessing a dear friend becoming a radiant mother. We went to see her and her tiny baby, as well as her husband, and her own mama, who is visiting. It’s just so hard for me to wrap my head around the goddesses that women and people who give birth are. The immense strength that just lives inside them, springing forth. Their capability to get through such a HUGE medical event. That at the end they become so magnificently attuned to this little life they have created – this is an all-encompassing beautiful sight. My friend describes feeling the moment that this immense protective instinct kicked in, just taking hold of her, as if nothing else matters any longer.
We eat cheesecake and I hold the baby. I can’t drink my coffee, for fear of my clumsiness. I envision, in horrifying vivid mental technicolor, accidentally spilling hot liquid on this baby and ruining his life forever, scarring him as well as his dear family for the rest of their lives. It’s a smart decision that I wait to pass the baby to Frank before downing the coffee in a few gulps before we have to leave. We took an uber to our friends’. In typical New York fashion, it took 35 minutes to get there, but now, the Uber back says it will take an hour. We worry we will miss our flight if we don’t end up at the airport 3 hours before departure.
We don’t miss our flight, but we do end up, in the back of our Uber, having to pop the champagne we forgot someone had gifted us at our leaving party. We drink it alongside our favorite foodtruck burritos (a real meal, finally!). The only way to leave New York behind is to honor it in typical New York chaotic fashion, drunk and deliriously giddy.
Words on a Whim 
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