crisp cardboard boxes.

new, unused.

I’m moving in less than a week—an inevitability still not apparent to my daughter, who casually asked last night: “What day are we moving anyway?”

“Monday,” I answered just as casually.

I watched her eyes grow comically wide and braced for what was coming.

“Monday?! MON-day?!”

She paraded in a circle of semi-feigned panic, while I waited — with what I hope amounted to patience — for the shock, awe and outrage to hit their histrionic heights.

“Then why does it still look like this?” She flung her arms wide and waved them at the as-yet-to-be-deconstructed rooms around her.

There were boxes, sure. Taped under, half-full, top flaps still unfolded. But only a few. The built-in bookcase just outside my bedroom has been mostly emptied, but there are still too many odds and ends I don’t know what to do with: opened mail, picture books my daughter has long outgrown that I’m not quite ready to part with and, inexplicably, a few pairs of earrings still on the edges of the second and third shelves, where I’d always taken to storing them. (I don’t own enough jewelry to invest in a jewelry box; I barely even wear the earrings.)

I have cleared the kitchen counters of appliances. But five clear, empty containers are still lined against the backsplash, remnants from that the first year I spent here — the one where a man lived with us and purchased several kitchen items I probably never would’ve. He was a kitchen person. He likely cooked more hot meals during his brief stay than I have in in the pair of years since. These clear containers he brought in were intended to store pasta, sugar, flour. There are three more, meant for cereal, in a low cabinet beside the stove. I do not eat cereal. I do not store my pasta, sugar or flour in clear containers. I didn’t even when he was here.

So what of those? Should I keep them and try to become the kind of person who keeps an aesthetic kitchen?

The spices are still brimming from the bottom shelf of an upper cupboard. Should those be boxed in cardboard? Should I purchase yet another lidded plastic bin? Should I store them now and eat out for the next few days? Should I wait till the night before the move?

I have culled about half my closest, mostly of shameful fast fashion purchases made over the course of the pandemic. Clothes I bought just to try on, just to spend fifteen minutes bending and leaning and twirling in front of my phone’s ten-second timer. Outfits I bought as aspiration. When I moved here, I thought I might become a woman who attends summer festivals in backless maxi-dresses with the sides cut out. I thought I might be asked on actual dates with men whose breath I’d hear catch when I opened my front door. There is lingerie, too. Cheap, scratchy lace sets I found on Amazon. I wore each just once for the man who lived here. I find them among his single, errant sock or small stack of discarded t-shirts that also tumble from the corners of my walk-in as I continue to gut it for the move.

There are unopened canvases in there. And in my bedroom, there’s one on which I’ve (poorly) painted the head and shoulders of a woman. It still sits on an easel, a monument to my indecision. Do I take this? Or just take a photo of it and let it go? It is not nice enough to hang and too cumbersome to pointlessly store.

A stack of smaller canvases are in my daughter’s closet, early-pandemic experiments I painted in which I immediately lost interest. “Can I have them?” she asked when she saw me shoving them under my bed two and half years ago. Sure. They are waiting to be pulled from her top shelf, where they’ve been sitting, dusty and undisturbed.

I’ve made two trips to Walmart for boxes. Crisp, flat cardboard boxes, marked on the side as small, medium or large. Growing up, my mom always collected our moving boxes from grocery stores. She’d asked a worker if they had any to spare and they’d tell her to come back on inventory day — which always differed, depending on the store. When we’d return, they’d load us up with a mishmash of broken down paper goods, stained, water-warped, torn.

I never liked packing my things in those boxes, their brands still somewhat legible on the unripped bits of surface. Boxes that once held stacks of Wheaties, bunches of Chiquita bananas, jugs of Tropicana orange juice, Lean Cuisine or Toaster Strudel. It was hard to imagine starting fresh when we were storing our belongings in some corporation’s cast-offs.

When I can afford to, I buy unused moving boxes. The kind sold in the aisle of a big-box store entirely devoted to moving supplies, with lines on their tops meant to be filled in with a list of contents. I buy rolls of tape, too. Fresh Sharpies. Bubble wrap.

This is the first move where I’ve been able to truly afford to. This is the first move where I’ve had time to let the apartment look like I may or may not be moving in a few days.

All my other moves have been under duress, the contents of every prior dwelling hastily dumped into huge garbage bags, to be either trashed, hauled or stored. The sorting that determined which was always dubious at best. In prior moves, I sold all the pieces too large to carry or fit into the back of a rented van.

Whenever I’ve moved before, I’ve been outrunning something.

This dates back to 2001, the year I graduated college. Like most recent grads who haven’t landed jobs by the time they need to leave campus for good, I figured I’d move back home for a few months, completely unaware of how long a job search could potentially stretch. Two months into summer, I found out that the house I’d come back to was already in foreclosure.

I’d known my mother and her husband were having problems. They’d always had problems. They’d been married since I was 10 and I’d never known them to be happy about it. Tolerant at best, but mostly resigned. My stepfather had apparently grown weary of resignation. He’d quietly stopped paying the mortgage and hadn’t disclosed that fairly important fact to my mom until it was too late to do much about it other than pack — something she put off until about 48 hours before the sheriff was due to dump the contents of the two-story townhouse on the front lawn. Contents that contained more than a few things that her husband had left behind when he vacated the house on his own a few months before.

I know now that my mother waited so long because she didn’t know where we would go — or rather, she didn’t want to return to the only place we could go: her mother’s. Figuring out an alternative felt as insurmountable as the effort of artful and unhurried packing must’ve. At the time, I didn’t understand the delay or how I could’ve intervened earlier to prevent the disorganization and panic. In the years since, I’ve developed a near-paranoic practice of trying to outmaneuver that level of disorganization and panic.

That move — that staying-up-all-night, driving around to housing complexes with strategically-placed open dumpsters and throwing in everything we couldn’t afford to haul, despite the huge stickers warning that “outside dumping” was prohibited — is something I’d consider to be one of my canon events. It shaped my entire approach to adulthood because it happened at the precipice of it, and most of the decisions I’ve made since can be traced, in part or whole, to its impact.

My next major move was from the post-foreclosure two-bedroom apartment I rented for my mother and me to an alcove in a basement in Yonkers, where I attended grad school. I tell anyone who asks that I got an MFA because I wanted to be a better writer. But the real reason was that I wanted to leave that apartment, one I wouldn’t haven chosen to rent, if I’d been on my own. It was too expensive for me to maintain on my own, too far removed from the goals I’d set for myself — all of which included leaving home and living alone.

When I left, I only took my own belongings — whichever of them would fit in my then-boyfriend’s car. My mother contended with the rest, which went into a storage unit I paid for until I couldn’t afford to anymore. Those items —whatever they were — wound up in foreclosure, too.

I am an entirely unsentimental person when it comes to leaving things behind. I have lost cherished books, mementos gifted with all the care or romance or sincerity the giver could muster, important documents, unopened appliances, far more material goods that I’ll ever be able to remember or miss.

I am not precious about reducing the things I’ve managed to accumulate in any home to Moving Day trash.

What I am precious about — or rather, what has become most precious to me — is having and keeping my own housing. Every dwelling where I’ve been the leaseholder has been hard-fought. I don’t think I’ve spent a single night in any place where I’ve paid rent on time and not been quite consciously grateful that I’ve somehow continued to do so. As a freelance writer, occasional paid podcaster and breadwinner for at least one other person (and often two) for most of my adult life, I rarely had stable income. There were always long stretches of time when I couldn’t afford to make my own home.

This apartment — the one we are leaving in less than a week — was mine for three years and four months. I chose it, signed the lease and paid the rent alone (including the year where a man was here; he was paying his own rent elsewhere, while quarantining with us).

This was the longest lease I’ve held to date, the longest time I’ve spent in one place trying to make it feel like a home, trying to domesticate that feral, peripatetic part of myself that never feels truly at home anywhere. It is where that part of me has been as tamed as she can be.

We are moving into something bigger. Three bedrooms, a few neighborhoods over, in a school district I hope will be better for my daughter. Renting there feels both practical and impractical. Strategic for its highly touted public school benefits. And potentially foolhardy, as I’ll be officially laid off just two weeks after we move in. I don’t know what my next job will be or how much it will pay or how the quality of life I’ve gradually improved during my time here will be impacted by whatever’s to come. I don’t know if, once we get there, I’ll face that familiar, near-paranoic urge to get ahead of what I cannot get ahold.

Those are questions for other days. The movers are what matter now, the three men arriving in six days to heft whatever we’ve packed and stickered in a truck large enough to preserve our current semblance of home.

I’ve procrastinated enough. Back to figuring out what-all can fit in a freshly-assembled box marked “large.”