Monday, April 11, 2016

Lost-Tooth Feeling

I'm waiting on a phone call that will let me know whether or not I'm about to become a published author. So I'm going to try and write something to distract myself.

I started packing up a little today to get ready to move to a different spot on campus for the summer. Yup, I'm staying here in Colorado to work and roll in dough. Not really. I'm just kind of hoping that I won't be as desperately poor as this year. I've gotten really good at moving lately. My "pack up and go" skills have gotten so streamlined, I can pack up all of my belongings, or at least 95% of them, into two large suitcases. Talk about minimalism. I started thinking about how when you first start packing, you have to take down all of the Post-its and photos and cards and doodles off of the walls, and put them into some box to rattle around. And the room starts to lose its' personality. Like, the walls become bland and beige again, the blankness of the space starts to swallow you up instead of being the perfect backdrop for the explosion of images that my room often becomes.

In my room in Wisconsin, I had photos all over my closet door, and I saved every single picture that people drew for me over the four years of high school, taping them all to the wall. But when I had to move out, suddenly any vivacity from my personality in the room was sucked out of the space. It just felt really weird. It was kind of like the feeling that you get when you are little and lose a tooth. Your tongue just keeps running over the spot where the tooth used to be, and it doesn't hurt or cause you distress, but you just keep running over the empty space over and over again. Or it's kind of like the feeling you get when you get a significant haircut and hop in the shower, and you run your hands along the length of your hair, but an inch or two is missing, prefaced by blunt, soft, straight ends.

The actual process of moving day is different. On the actual day, you just focus on the hassle that is getting your stuff all gathered and shoved on a truck and shipped to another place. The pain-in-the-butt-ness of moving is so irritating, you can't think about the fact that the place you lived in and the place that held your personality is now stripped of anything that resembled you and holds no personality. But when you first start, when the pictures come down and the winter clothes and little unnecessary baubles get packed up and and the walls and shelves are bare, that's the weirdest feeling, the lost-tooth part of part of moving to a new place.

She still hasn't called. Gah.

-k

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