Temporary

Having my belongings packed into moving boxes indicates to me a temporary state, a state where I know I'm going to move again. I have lived out of boxes since 1991 when my now-ex-boyfriend and I moved into a house that turned out to be dirty and too uncomfortable to live in. In our next apartment, we kept boxes packed in the second bedroom, even tho' the apartment was more than comfortable. If I had lived there alone I might have kept it. But I left it when I left him. Perhaps we knew the relationship was, by that time, temporary.

When I bought my first house, I left a roomful of boxes packed, taking up the space in my second bedroom for far too long. Then I moved them upstairs so I could at least inhabit that bedroom as an office and a comfy place to hang out, with a twin bed in the corner where I could look outside into my back yard. I lived there for eight years — hardly temporary. When I moved almost 300 miles away because everything had changed, all I cared to take with me permanently was that house, something I long for even now 10 years later.