Item: 8 cardboard boxes

It's happening again. I am doing a reckoning of boxes I have available, and I'll need many more in the coming weeks because I'm going to move. Again. This is just a short-distance move, but it will become all-consuming anyway, I'm sure. The 8 is just a remnant of the proud collection I once had, but you always need a few on hand, I've done this enough to recognize a good box when I see one.

For all my talk of adventure and the thrill of upheaval and fear of stagnating in life, I lost a lot of sleep last night feeling sorry and scared of leaving.

How does it happen that a human being becomes so involved in a familiar place, regardless of what kind of place it happens to be? I have this sense that I am a person who drives down this road, goes in this door, gets her silverware out of this drawer. A person can feel lost, as I did last night, when she's separated from these things and has to go floundering around someplace else.

This seems rather like a small-scale version of the stumbling feeling that comes when it's a person who's not there anymore. It reminds me of a line from "Little Rock," an old country song by Collin Raye: without you, baby I'm not me. I take cues from the people around me, bounce off of them, respond to them, and in getting used to a person I become familiar with those ways of being me. It's hard to feel like myself when there's no one around who knows me, and I can't slide into the patterns that have become what I do.

I've been fixated on the question of to move or not to move for several days now, but here's hoping that I can turn my attention back to the rest of the world, which will move on.