So once again (and again and again), I packed things up, piled them into the minivan and spend an afternoon (and then another, and then another) moving in. This time, though, the drive was shorter—a mere hour into the city—and I am not alone—I'm along for the ride with Liz.
I've come to hate constantly picking up pieces of my life and relocating them. As pieces of furniture have been looted from my bedroom (now scattered about the house, where someone will actually use them) and random junk has replaced them—the feeling that I don't have any real permanent place has settled in very distinctly.
In the next fourteen months, I have 8 moves to make: Boston to home, home to London, London to home, home to Penn, Penn to home, home to wherever I will be living next summer, home again, and then, back to Penn. Maybe more (potentially less, but I doubt it).
I have no stability, really. No address at which I can be reached for more than four months straight for a very long time, and this is starting to bother me a little bit.
In a way, I am happy about all this; I am young and have the energy (mostly) to keep up with this, even if I am not sleeping on a very comfortable bed. I can pack light, I can live a Spartan existance. There's something very exciting about it. But I just wish I had something a bit more permanent to fall back on.
I'm way, way too prone to sentimentality—I used to remember all the hotel room numbers we'd stayed in on vacations as a kid—like room 513 of the Embassy Suites outside of San Francisco somehow cared or noticed when we left after a week. I wonder if rooms 1814 or 304 (in my building) or 29 (from last year) miss me. They probably don't; hundreds of people have moved in and out of them and left few traces—certainly not enough to miss.
With all the moving and changing, I'm sure some of my nostalgia will be watered-down—a good thing. You can only wistfully smile about so many places in such a small span of time—and I've got to save room in my stupid memory for London, which I know will be hard to leave (or at least, I hope it will be).
Anyway. I can see Fenway and the Prudential from my window here, which makes me immensely happy to be near (in, actually) Boston again, where the Yankees are undisputedly evil (and three games back) and nothing is ever open late enough.
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