(Not) Lost in Transition

It's amazing to me to realize how movable a life can be.  More specifically, how movable and mutable my life can be.

 

Yesterday I woke up not feeling lovely, exactly, so I spent most of the morning in bed.  When I felt sufficiently recovered, I undertook a daunting task: I showered, pulled back my hair, and walked the two and a half blocks to clean my former apartment.

 

In a fallacy most would consider particularly pathetic, I felt like the clouds overhead signaled how I felt.  Slightly stormy and ready to clean a world.  (Okay, so perhaps ready to clean a microcosm of the world, since it would be a sad statement on my character if where I lived at any given time encompassed my whole world)

 

But when I arrived at the apartment, I realized how little attachment I felt to the place.  Everything that had occurred there in the past few months suddenly (and surprisingly--but undisturbingly) took on a surreal quality.  As though for the past seven and a half months, I had been living in some type of dream.

 

I didn't realize how completely detached I felt until I went into the room that was once mine and found myself examining the floor as if for the first time, reading the marks I found there: Oh yes, there are the outlines of the two shelves.  And there are the marks for my desk.  My bed rested in that corner.  I slept there, and then walked over there, if I wanted books.  And if I turned too quickly, I kicked the desk . . .

 

As I scrubbed the window, I found myself thinking about how this was the window I had gazed through to watch fireworks on the Fourth of July, when I hadn't know anyone well enough to bum a ride somewhere because my roommate had gone off with her family.

 

And the oddest thing of all: even though I could think of many things that had gone on in that place, none of them particularly seemed as though they had happened to me.  Remembering everything that went on there gave me the distinct feeling of remembering a story someone had once told me.

 

This is always the sign of a move I needed: the past slowly fades into the seeming intangible, and the present always seems most real.  And that, I think, is how it should be.