Moving Day

 I've only lived in two cities my entire life, so I always find moving weird. I spent my first 18 years in one city where I made plenty of friends who I'm still really close with, and then I came to college and stayed here for four years. Now I say I find moving weird mostly because I'm not used to it, its sad to see places you had so many memories in (good or bad) go empty. However emotional moving may be I do see the silver lining of the situation, I get to go somewhere and make new friends and memories.

           When you live on the third floor every task is a small workout. It’s great for fitness junkies and those who like to maintain their cardio, but terrible for most. I honestly had no problem with living on the third floor, it gave my apartment complex a view, and in West Texas that view from just thirty feet up can reach for miles upon miles. As a bonus I became pretty clever with taking up groceries, multiple trips to my car was too much of a hassle. Slide a bag or two down my wrist using my watch as a means to stop the bags from falling, grab all the light bags in one hand and the heavy in the other, keys ready to open my apartment door. I got it down to a science; gravity had nothing on me and my food. Well at least I thought I had it down until I moved out.

            After living in the same apartment for the past three years I kinda forgot that there would be a moment in which I would say good bye to it all. My apartment, shared with three others, became a social hotspot amongst my friends. I don’t even know why, maybe it was because we had an Xbox, Wii, PS3, PS2, Genesis, SNES and a NES, and would always play Brawl. Maybe it was because before we all turned the big twenty-one we had all the alcohol. Maybe it was because we had a back light and a bunch of posters to go along with it, like the Bob Marley one that looked like his ghost had haunted the poster underneath the violet glow. Maybe it was because we had a hammock, a chair made entirely of old couch cushions and a custom made ball pit. I really don’t know, but what I do know is that as I’m putting everything into boxes I feel the life of this apartment slowly dwindle.

            Packing is weird, I’m fully conscious of picking up or taking away something from the setting and pulling it into a brown cardboard box, but when I look back into the room I feel as if the room is slowly draining itself of its personality, becoming a blank slate for the next tenet. My room’s personality is all but a shell of its former self, no posters of Watchmen or abstract pieces of art to show I was there. Sure my laptop and speakers are still in the room, but only because they are essential. Even the small pile of dirty clothes that typically grew on the floor was disappearing; each t-shirt and pair of pants was currently being washed as another brown box waited patiently on top of the dryer waiting to consume them. Everything is ready to leave the interiors of my college apartment to go and fill up another blank slate apartment twelve hours away.

            New beginnings, that’s what moving is all about. I know emotions of moving are hard, nobody likes goodbyes after all, but they’re apart of life. I’ve made so many friends here over the past four years of college and as much as I would like to hold onto them as long as possible I have also fully embraced the idea of moving to a new city without knowing anyone. My apartment and I had plenty of memories, plenty of memories I will never forget, but to resist the idea of going out to make new memories is to resist the very thing that makes living life worth living: change.