‘Twas the night before moving, when all through the house

The closets were empty, and my mind set loose.

Everywhere I looked I was leaving behind

That and that and memories that bind.

Another night before moving: first from Russian Hill to her house; then from her house into the Pod and temporary housing—very gratefully received temporary housing in West Oakland; now from one temporary house to the next across the country in Boston. I will live temporarily with my son Sam and his family. My plan is to have a new place of my own in February.

My mail, already going to three different impermanent addresses, will be screwed up for a year. Mail forwarding is a suggestion by the Post Office. Much slips through. Mail has been stolen from my Oakland son’s front door. I hardly know what mail is going where.

It’s hilarious that she said to me that her life was just as disrupted as mine by our divorce. She who changed nothing, whose life goes back to exactly to the way it was before she met me. It’s hilarious only if you aren’t experiencing the truly dislocating, life up-ending consequences of ending a marriage and moving out.

I’m moving too much of that I’m certain, yet cannot eliminate further what’s coming with me. I’ve done the downsizing already. (Oh, did she downsize her life, too?)

I want to be reunited with all this stuff. That’s the sorry truth. I take comfort in what I’ve accumulated. It’s not that much—it all fits in one moving 8’ X 16’ moving Pod. They say it holds four rooms of furniture. I don’t have four rooms of furniture. I have a few chests, one chair, a table (no bed), bookcases, and twenty-five boxes of books, many boxes of papers, and artwork, and framed paintings, and a lot of this and that, random things too good to toss away, not good enough to sell, someday needed for sure. I have no idea how it will fit into whatever small apartment I come to rent.

Moving does have a cleansing appeal. Despite too much remaining there has been a paring down, a sorting out of the essential versus the almost essential. There’s the anticipation of thinking about a new arrangement, in a new place all my own. There’s an appeal to that.

I fit into her life, into her house. She never fit into my life. I adopted her ways—and then she blamed me for always being there, anticipating, trying to please, trying to fit in. I gave up everything to be with her.

Foolish me.

So moving again. Back East. It’s a return not a retreat. I don’t want to be in her orbit. I don’t want to be yet another castoff, another healing broken heart. She’s had several of those already. She’s been the cause in the matter, called the shots, but not the decision maker now.

Her life will likely remain small, maybe even smaller. Emotional trust zero.

Who could trust a bounder? I did and look where it got me.

Bounced and bounded!

Let’s reframe it a springboard!