Moving Day: A Personal Essay

I have always enjoyed moving. I’ve only done it a handful of times, and not always under the most ideal circumstances, but I have enjoyed it nonetheless. Moving is one of life’s unique experiences, in that it is well-balanced and still manages to traverse great extremes of emotion. Packing, moving, and unpacking bring us face to face in a very real way with the past, present, and future. More than birthdays, more than New Year’s Day, Moving Day is by far the best time to take stock of your life.


The first stop on the roller coaster is a high: you’re moving. Money has been spent (or promised), deals have been made, and your fate is sealed. You start thinking about your new location. Every little thing about it excites you: you’re closer to so-and-so’s house, getting to work will be easier, there’s a lovely park a ten minute walk down the road, the pizza delivery guy won’t take as long now- everything is cause for enthusiasm.


Following this high is a small dip. As you begin packing, you feel a slight downward tug on your insides. It’s only barely perceivable over the excitement felt from deciding to move in the first place, but it’s there. It starts in the closet as you pull things from the shelves that you probably haven’t looked at since the last time you moved. These are the keepsakes, the things that have survived the moves before and, it seems, will survive this move as well as you transfer them to the waiting empty boxes. This step takes longer than any other part of packing because you cannot simply transfer these things to the boxes to be placed on another shelf in another house. No, you must consider each one and remember why you’ve kept it all this time. An award won in high school (why is it so hard to throw away something you haven’t even thought about in years?), mementos and pictures, ridiculous trinkets that hold no meaning to the rest of the world. Because of who gave them, though, and for what reasons, these ridiculous trinkets are placed lovingly in the empty boxes. They are destined for another high shelf, certainly, but there they will continue to fulfill their unappreciated but important role.


This nostalgic melancholy is brief, however, replaced by the joy that is what I like to call The Great Purge. Though it sounds like the habit of a young girl with an image problem, The Great Purge is my favorite part of moving. As you pull down all these items you haven’t seen or even thought of in years, you begin a sort of triage. Some, mentioned above, have sentimental value and are thus rescued. Some others had no place in your current dwelling but in your new home may well prove useful, and so they are spared. The last group, however, has no hope. In this triage, they are unable to be saved. In fact, you’re not quite sure why they were saved the first time. They are stacks of CD cases, some empty, some containing CD’s that you don’t quite remember buying and certainly would never admit to liking. They are Mardi Gras beads and a lei left over from a party you went to and had a pretty good time at, but not good enough to commemorate with these dime-store baubles. As the garbage bag gets fatter and fatter, you start to wonder what else you could do without. Pretty soon your life is looking a little more streamlined as what’s important is saved and what’s not is burned away. The Great Purge is a beautiful thing.


And then comes the last day in your old place. This is a downward plunge you could not have expected during those first exciting days of moving. The furniture’s gone and the last boxes have been slid into the back of the truck. You’re standing in a living room that hasn’t been this empty since the day you moved in. You’ve come home to this room every day for years. It’s been accommodating a dependable all this time, and now it’s strange to see it empty. It holds none of your things and has no meaning to you. In this brief limbo- moved out but not yet moved in- you are homeless. As you pull the door closed behind you, you imagine you can hear the emptiness echo with that one last click.


Finally, in true roller coaster fashion, you’re shot upward once more before the ride ends. Your new home technically is as empty as the living room you just left behind, but it doesn’t feel like it. Devoid of any furniture, it is still full of something that abandoned living room lacked: possibility. It’s a new space to make your own. You are no longer homeless- quite the opposite, in fact. You’re faced with the possibility of a thousand new homes as you arrange and rearrange your old things into their new places. The alchemy of old and new will soon make them blend together and you will become accustomed to it all, but during that first day the world is a different place. You go to sleep that night far away from where you woke up that morning, and yet you are still at home.