Stuff

Now that I’m officially graduated, done with my internship, and back from our quick little trip to the Grand Canyon and Mesa Verde, it’s officially time to sell everything we own for our upcoming move to Prague.

Well, almost everything.

My parents came down for my graduation and we filled their truck with some of our possessions we will store with them while we’re away. We will also be filling our car with the last few things we want to keep and driving it to Seattle in a few weeks, to store with E’s parents.

Everything else, pretty much the rest of our stuff, we are giving away or selling.

It’s surprisingly difficult to dismantle our apartment and sort through it all, debating and deciding. I’m terrible at making decisions, and the fact that our parents don’t want to store that much, nor do they have the space, and we can only take two bags (plus carry-ons) each, I need to be fairly ruthless and quick about these decisions.

Even the things that I get to keep but that are now in storage are hard for me to pack up and send off. I’m not sure when I’ll see them again, or if I want to, or what my life will be like when I finally take those things out of their boxes.

I never considered myself that materialistic (except for my small shopping addiction), but living in a place for two years, you tend to accumulate a lot.

E and I moved in together when we moved to Colorado, so many of these things represent the beginning of this new phase of our relationship, and all of the nerves and anticipation that go along with that. We love living together, but it’s different from it was in those first weeks, when it was all possibility and attempting to mesh our individual styles into something we both liked.

I participated fully in the collecting, decorating, and purchasing of all of these things (except for that gigantic television), and here we are, putting it all in boxes, putting it up for sale, stuffing it in bags to be donated.

While it feels good to purge everything, I also feel sad and guilty to be doing all of this. What does it mean that we decided to give up this life so easily? I suppose it wasn’t necessarily easy, but it seemed like a no-brainer at the time for me.

I’ve always loved travel, and I’ve always wanted to live abroad, so I knew I (we) couldn’t turn down this opportunity.

With this opportunity, though, I can’t shake the feeling that I casually decided to throw out our carefully considered and curated life.

Sure, all of this stuff is made of just things, but these things made up our life. The tiny blue ramekins, that I only used several times, were the first items for our kitchen that I received. The red ladder-shelf, made for us by E’s parents, was carefully decorated every holiday. The dish towels I collected represented every season and I always loved bringing out the new ones. The art was collected from my travels, or our travels, and accumulated in my parents’ basement long before I ever knew where I would be moving and if E and I would move in together. The bar stools were hemmed and hawed over until we finally pulled the trigger, and we must have sat on a million couches before picking the perfect one, a giant brown suede one, complete with a chaise lounge. We spent many hours bonding and working on this couch, taking naps, cuddling. E spent the night on the couch after his wisdom teeth surgery while I slept next to him on the floor. Many of our family and friends have slept on this couch, especially after the hole in our blow-up mattress developed. We’ve found a place for our postcard collection and found our unique decorating style (it incorporates a lot of maps…).

All of these things remind me that we have really made a life here in Colorado. Often, I’ve felt swallowed by school here, or isolated from the city since we live so far south, near E’s job. I had a tough AmeriCorps year when we first got here, filled with way too many hours of work and worry, and I missed having mountains right out my back yard and I missed everything green. Yet we’ve made many memories, we’ve found a path near us that leads to a tiny waterfall, we’ve had three annual holiday potlucks and countless dinner parties, we’ve had friends and relatives stay and comment how much they love our apartment, and we’ve decorated our shower with bath crayons (and our friends have decorated it, too!). We’ve thrown a baby shower and a bachelorette party and a welcome-back party. We’ve had two just-the-two-of-us Christmases and two Easters together here and one Thanksgiving for friends. We’ve cooked many meals in the kitchen, grilled many things on our tiny porch, had a lot of laughs and fights in the living room, had lots of late-night talks in the bedroom. We’ve watched countless TV shows, researched countless places to visit, watched countless sunsets from our little balcony. I’ve discovered my love of having fresh flowers and how candles can make a little apartment seem even cozier and can soothe my wish to have a fireplace.

We’ve had a life here, and it’s taken packing it all away to remind me of this. To remind me that even though we’re going towards a new direction that’s always been a dream of mine, I shouldn’t leave this life behind casually. This life formed our relationship, helped me make other dreams come true, made us connections with so many great people, let me experience a new city and state. This was real life, even though this life also felt like we were waiting for the next phase to begin. It’s so exciting that it’s so close, now, but sometimes I wonder why it seemed so easy to give it all up for this next phase.

As we pack everything up, I’m grateful for this phase, a phase that often felt like transition as we figured out what we really wanted from ourselves and each other. I moved away from my hometown for the first time ever, and moved in with a boyfriend. I’ve learned what I want in a home, a few things that I want out of life, and E and I have started to make a life together. I’ve learned that while I love this little apartment and everything it has meant to us, and will always mean, I am so ready for the next adventure. It’s bittersweet to say farewell to our things (and will be just straight-up sad to say goodbye to the people), but I also can’t wait to see what happens next.

        ^^we’ll miss you number 202!

Linking up with Shanna!