Moving

This past weekend was the last time I will ever step foot inside the house I've lived in since middle school. I thought it wouldn't hit me so hard, because it's just a house and for the last 8 years I've spent most of my time in Boston anyway. But it ended up being more intense than I'd anticipated. I went through a number of stages, the first of which was combing the house and throwing out anything I didn't think we needed anymore. It felt good for a few hours. Then came the sense of being overwhelmed. Twenty-six years worth of my stuff was stored in the basement, and the task of separating important junk from real junk was epic. Then came irritability, and a needless argument with my little bro when I accused him of "not being stressed out enough." What does that even mean?! He put me in my place pretty fast. Finally I was just exhausted and emotionally checked-out, which made me a real a party-pooper at my family's 4th of July party. This all came to a head Tuesday morning at 3am. I had been laying in bed for a few hours, obsessing about some trash bags that I had filled and thrown in the back of Chris's truck; and I was remembering a moment in the basement when my mom said I was being unsentimental because I threw out my runner-up spelling bee plaque from 2nd grade. So I got out of bed, went outside in my pajamas, and started tearing through bags in the middle of the street. At one point, my brother told me I was scaring him. But I rescued some things that my mom would have been rightly pissed to find out I disposed of including tap shoes from age 6. At this point it was 4am, and Chris suggested we go to Wawa so he could get a chicken sandwich. Mona, the employee at the deli counter, was apparently not surprised to see my brother eating a chicken sandwich in the middle of the night. This brought the sense of levity I needed to move on from the bag thing and get an hour of sleep before I had to be on the road to Boston. In the end, I'm glad I was able to visit while they go through this move, but I hope I didn't add more stress to the process for them. Adios, 10 Bell Street.