A Star is Born, A Star Burns Out

Unpacking is a unique kind of task, an action that deserves its own category. It's a action that requires fortitude that has less to do with the boxes themselves and everything to do with the contents.

I had a long weekend and a plan. Unpack. Set up the apartment. Make it feel less like a layover and more like a place I actually live. I didn't plan on staying here a year, but I'm still not ready to go back to where I'm from. I definitely haven't decided what comes next, but I'm starting to accept that the decision will only happen if I give it time, and attention, if I'm honest.

So I unpacked, tired but committed.

The apartment didn't come with much of a plan for how it should feel. I wanted to build it around pieces I actually liked, not just whatever survived over a decade of trying to build a life with another person. Which was fairly easy since I either donated or gave away most of my assorted items in the months that followed the breakup. What remained was 15 boxes and two suitcases of miscellaneous items, memorable and mundane alike.

The ivy patterned Corningware was a bit of both, though. My mom and grandma sourced that set piece by piece and gave it to me for the first Christmas in my first house. It was never just cups and plates, though. It was two women spending time and energy tracking down the dinnerware of my childhood, even though the company changed and the pattern was discontinued for years. That meant a lot to me.

I knew there was a risk in shipping it. You don't send fragile things across the country and assume they will all arrive the way they left. I knew that going in.

It still hits a little differently, though, opening a box and finding the flour container in a few large chunks. The creamer dish completely crushed. And, somehow the cruelest one, a mug from my tea set. Yes, I have the matching ivy patterned tea service to go with the dinnerware. Come at me for being traditional, but keep your pinky up, damn it.

Now, none of this is a tragedy. I know that. It's dinnerware from the nineties. It's replaceable, mostly, in the sense that Corningware still exists and Etsy has developed an entire economy around chipped vintage mugs with more character than mine. But knowing something isn't a tragedy doesn't make you feel less like a moron standing over a cardboard box, quietly sad about a creamer dish.

Then again, the bigger surprise was not what broke. It was what showed up that wasn't supposed to be here at all.

My dad packed up a box of photos and mementos and sent it to me. This box was full of the sort of things that spanned my entire life, from Archie comics to art projects, family photos to choir practice notes. Except it came in with a handful of other boxes that were supposed to stay in storage in Virginia. Not stay behind, exactly. Stay in the in-between, in the pile of things I wasn't ready to decide about yet.

Instead, they found me. Fermenting equipment I bought during a phase I will generously call "ambitious." Loose herbs from a summer I told myself I would hone my medicinal herb craft. Soap making supplies from an autumn that promised more follow-through than it delivered. Assorted candles, because they are both practical (when the lights go out, duh) and have a pleasant scent that my broken olfactory can detect.

I stood in my apartment surrounded by evidence. Not evidence of who I am. Evidence of who I kept almost becoming.

I don't know what to do with any of it just yet, which is kind of exhaustion that I thought I'd escaped. Not the exhaustion of loss. The exhaustion of choice. Keep it, and admit I'm still someone who might ferment something someday. Toss it, and admit I'm probably not.

A year ago, almost to this exact week, I was standing at a different edge entirely. Ending. Leaving. Exposing myself to risk, to someone new, to a life with no corroborated details yet. That fear made ordinary decisions incredibly heavy. It didn't help that it was also stressful at work, too. Every day I would wake up dreading the day ahead, and my chest tightens even now just thinking about what my life looked like last autumn.

This fear is smaller. Quieter. It is the fear of a broken creamer dish and an unwanted box of soap supplies, not the fear of an entirely uncharted life. I notice the difference, and I let myself feel a little proud of it, the way you might notice you no longer flinch at a sound that used to send you straight into another room.

I'm learning that starting over doesn't mean everything arrives intact, and it doesn't mean the past stays where you left it, either. Some things break in transit that you meant to keep. Some things follow you that you meant to leave behind. Neither one is really up to you once the boxes arrive and you're torn between crying and laughing.

I did neither. I took a deep breath and made some decisions.

The ivy patterned Corningware that survived gets a shelf of its own, somewhere I will see it every morning. The broken pieces were thrown away, without ceremony, because grief doesn't require a eulogy for a creamer dish. My box of photos gets set aside, to be opened slowly on a day when I have the headspace for it, and not immediately shipped back.

And the fermenting equipment, the herbs, the soap supplies, the candles? I'm giving myself permission to let some of it go. Not because those interests were foolish. But because I don't have to keep the evidence of every version of myself I once tried on, just to prove I contain multitudes.

I'm rebuilding a kitchen, and apparently also a "self," out of what actually survived the move and what I'm finally willing to admit didn't need to make the trip at all.

Tracy Lawrence's song "Time Marches On" isn't a sad song, exactly, though it'll put a lump in your throat if you let it. It's a song about how life keeps moving whether or not you've caught up to it yet, how the people, and pieces, in your life change over time. My mom and grandma didn't know, when they tracked down that discontinued pattern piece by piece, that it would end up unpacked in a California apartment neither of them has seen. But time marches on, and things travel further than the people who gave them to you ever expected.

Some of what marched on with me got dinged up along the way. Some of it, thankfully, made it through in one piece. And some of it, the fermenting equipment and the loose herbs and the soap supplies, marched on for so long without me even noticing that I forgot I was still carrying them.

There's no deeper meaning here in my song choice, but when it came on as I was cleaning up the flour on the floor, it stuck with me for the rest of the day. Its metronomic quality, and the feeling of being suspended while things are happening all around you, is what's resonating in this moment of "in between."

That's what's comforting to me in this awkward version of acceptance I'm wading through.