The Lover in Another Country

How do you move? you ask yourself. You ask yourself this because you are moving soon. There is a certain date, less than a month away, and you are required to be out of your apartment. There are still many things to be done. You still need to make many important decisions. For now, you are evaluating. You’re thinking about you and your stuff. Soon, you will have to stop thinking and start doing. The driver of the moving van will want to know where all the stuff goes, and you’ll have to tell him something. You have no time yet to be excited or scared—that will surely happen in a giant rush as you sit in the van in the passenger’s seat and go north. You will try to stay calm and collected as you see the exit signs pass by at a frightening speed, but as you merge on to the interstate, the dam you have tried so hard to build the last 15 miles will surely break and you will laugh, or maybe cry, or maybe scream something terrible. You don’t know. For now, you have to deal with what’s in front of you. You need to decide what will be spared, which, out of all these objects you have collected over the years, will be boxed, and labeled, or put in a trash bag, gone. Every object is, now it seems more than ever, assuming its true weight, and you must dole out importance and necessity. You tag the objects mentally. Some of the important objects are not heavy, some weigh as little as a feather; indeed, there is an important object that is only a feather, one that your lover gave you when you were both living in his country, walking down the street, casually holding hands, when you came across this thing, this discarded feather from some blue bird that you thought was beautiful, or at least worth mentioning: “Oh, regarde la plume bleue!” and your lover picked it up for you and brushed it off, and you’d like to remember him blowing the dirt off of it with his beautiful lips before they were kissing you, quickly, and passionately, right there on that cobbled, foreign street. The feather will come with you now, though someday, you know, when you are trying to move even further away, you will think very little of it, so little of it that when you see it on the table you may only impart a sigh before sweeping it into the trash. You look around the apartment, which was, you must admit, quite good for you for the year you were in it, although too big for you alone, which is why, you decide, you had to put so many things in it, so many things that must move. You look at the bookshelves, and the bureau, and the bed frame—these objects are all heavy, but not really that important, and while they are not as important as the feather, they are necessary, but necessary doesn’t necessarily mean important, and that, too, is a factor. Each object must be taken into account. It is exhausting, even though you are, for now, just sitting here, looking, and considering. You take an object in your hand and consider it—it is a book, or maybe the ceramic lamp with the birds fused around its base, their bodies perched on the white logs, none of it moving. But you hold the object, feel its weight, and wonder where it will move, where it will go now, and then, where it will go later. You look at another object, a television, and it is then that you begin to panic, because it is neither important, nor necessary, but nice, a category that you hadn’t even considered up until now, when you saw it showing your wide eyes staring back at you. You call your lover in another country, because that is what you do when you are panicked, but he doesn’t answer. You put the phone down, and think of him, and then you think of his objects, his things around him, now as he is sleeping. Maybe there is still a picture of you somewhere in there, maybe in a black frame, maybe hung against the wall of his bedroom. You think about the things he had in his home, that large bed, the white sheets, the thick teak shelf that circled the entire room like a railing, the plant on his desk, the desk, the stool tucked under the desk, that book of poems you had read and marked, and gave to him to read knowing you wouldn’t get it back which made you happy. You wonder what he will do with all of his objects once he has to move again. But, if he doesn’t move, if he has considered already, without you knowing it, if he has decided already, without telling you, that the cost and weight of staying there with his things outweighs the cost of moving those objects again, then he will stay, over there, and you will be here, still holding a lamp in your hand, wondering how to move it.


...
(k)