Moving In/On

It's that time again

Grayson here. We’ve moved again, for the fourth summer in a row. Our things are everywhere and in all the wrong places, as if the same tornado that flew around Frank Ocean’s room has torn through ours. I’ve always romanticized moving, or rather, the idea of ending one thing and beginning something else. But this time around, I’ve started questioning this mode of being — forced chapterization — that I seem to have been stuck in for as long as I can remember.

I think I can pinpoint where it stems from. A couple weeks ago we were back in Mt. Juliet¹, and I was driving to meet M at her parents’ house on the same back road that I took countless times in high school. There used to be a line of trees along the road with a great field behind them which would whip past as I tried to beat my time going between our two houses (the record stands at seven minutes). That’s all gone now. In their place stands a new high school, a simulacrum modeled precisely after our own high school across town. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen this sprawling, gray complex bathed in floodlights, but this time it struck me as especially chilling, like I was seeing the ghost of our old school. And look, I was never really “rah rah Bear Pride Mount Juliet High,” but you can’t help forming an attachment to somewhere you spent so much time.

Seeing the new school was a stark reminder of the ugly transformation that Mt. Juliet is going through: huge swaths of land are being razed for assembly-line housing developments, garish shops and chain restaurants are taking the places of old ones that can’t stay in business. It was great to be living back home for the year that we were, but seeing all of this was painful. There’s a section of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (probably my favorite book I’ve read this year so far, I got chills once while reading it because of how good) which reminded me greatly of MJ:

In Maurilia, the traveler is invited to visit the city and, at the same time, to examine some old postcards that show it as it used to be: the same identical square with a hen in the place of the bus station, a bandstand in the place of the overpass, two young ladies with white parasols in the place of the munitions factory. If the traveler does not wish to disappoint the inhabitants, he must praise the postcard city and prefer it to the present one, though he must be careful to contain his regret at the changes within definite limits; admitting that the magnificence and prosperity of the metropolis Maurilia, when compared to the old, provincial Maurilia, cannot compensate for a certain lost grace, which, however, can be appreciated only now in the old postcards, whereas before, when that provincial Maurilia was before one's eyes, one saw absolutely nothing graceful and would see it even less today, if Maurilia had remained unchanged; and in any case the metropolis has the added attraction that, through what it has become, one can look back with nostalgia at what it was.

Beware of saying to them that sometimes different cities follow one another on the same site and under the same name, born and dying without knowing one another, without communication among themselves. At time even the names of the inhabitants remain the same, and their voices' accent, and also the features of the faces; but the gods who live beneath names and above places have gone off without a word and outsiders have settled in their place. It is pointless to ask whether the new ones are better or worse than the old, since there is no connection between them, just as the old post cards do not depict Maurilia as it was, but a different city which, by chance, was called Maurilia, like this one.

I’m thinking that in moving away from something, you can keep this postcard nostalgia and avoid having to witness the slow tooth-pull of progress. Then you can look back on different periods at a distance, hold them up against one another, turn them over and figure out what they mean, how they changed you. It’s difficult to do this while you’re in it — you can’t turn anything over without getting flipped yourself. I’ve long been a sucker for this drama that comes with encapsulation, with saying “it’s over now” and meaning it.  

But I’ve realized these endings have all been artificaially imposed by yours truly, probably as a result of being obssessed with endings of books and shows and movies. I wanted that kind of sentiment and narrative cohesion; I wanted crescendos, always. And there was comfort in that separation of before and after, how everything proceeding the end was the beginning of something else, building towards a new ending in the far distance.²

Turns out that more often that not, these narrative lines are blurry. This year, all we did was move across town, about ten minutes away. Life will be roughly the same. It’s weird to feel like you’ve ended one time and are entering another, then go to the same grocery store and get the same things. You can’t really crystallize something and put it up on the shelf when you’ve still got one foot in it. I even tried going to a new, closer gym, but the cavernous celings, odd spacing, and lack of music made it feel like a lame purgatory, so it looks like I’ll be returning to the last one. It’s more difficult than I previously imagined to separate things. No instant pictures, only developments in the waters of a darkroom.

In being denied my usual retrospection, I’m wondering if all this uprooting is worth it, narratively speaking (it makes a difference, I think, that we didn’t have a choice here — we had to move out of our century-old house before it got torn down). Times of disarray like this remind me of the importance I place on understanding where I live: I need to be able to see the walls, the boundaries. I need to be able to kick off from them, roam, and have them be there when I return. Not having this blueprint brings on a slight craziness in my head. I’m also reminded of a reliance on my pragmatism and organization, something I don’t need help remembering. A not-small part of my life seems to be moving something from one spot of the house to another, so opening up an unfamiliar drawer to an unfamiliar assortment of our things, not yet knowing where anything is, feels like a weird dream. 

Moving also forces you to review your relationships with your objects — all dead weight must be jettisoned. And your relationship to the things that stay is strengthened, I think, like how a particular synapse of a memory is strengthened by repeated use. But moving also makes everything feel heavier: in taking stock of all your things, you feel both their physical weight — the not yet unpacked boxes cramming you in — and the weight of responsibility for these things. After stuffing our Uhaul, I felt the acute sense that everything we just moved would not have moved without us. It all would have sat perfectly still unless we acted upon it, completely impartial to the moving process, to any owner, to any location at all. 

And there’s more weight here, of decision. You forget after living somewhere for a while that anything you own can move to any location of the house at any time. Then, after moving, you have to find a place for each and every one of your things. Everything that didn’t even have a place before must have a place now, or else you have to create a new “no-place” for these items that have not yet been sorted and perhaps never will (looking at you, random bag of vintage door knobs). Each of these decisions feels as if it’s final, even though you just demonstrated that every single thing you own, literally every spec of it, can be moved anywhere.

This all, of course, is exhausting. But it’s more exhausting to try and drum up sentimentality for everything involved with the move. The old place, the new place, old objects, new objects, everything getting an injection of significance. But one starts to feel spread thin, like parts of you are inside these things. I think I’d like to adopt a mode of thinking that looks outward, away from myself, instead of inward, towards myself. I’m trying to take to heart two quotes from Sheila Heti’s Alphabetical Diaries: “Don’t take yourself too seriously; don’t think about yourself at all” and “One day, when things are other than they are right now, I will wonder why I wanted to leave this time so quickly, as I now wonder the same thing about the past”

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There’s such a unique and strange sensation in being somewhere empty and open, like a flat field or a just-vacated house. I spent a while at our old place after we’d moved out to scrub things and sweep, and it felt odd to even walk around in any path or direction at all. You get a strange, minute thrill when standing in a spot in the room where you previously were unable to be, because of furniture or just because it didn’t make sense for you to be there. 

But it’s not like you really couldn’t have stood in that spot; it was there the whole time, under a dresser that could have easily been pushed aside. You could have stood there all along. I think this is one of the benefits of moving: it reminds you that you have this freedom to move your own body in space, to be somewhere different, maybe not anywhere, but many places that you wouldn’t think of. This goes for all of your objects too — they become unstuck, and then you’re reminded that they were never really stuck at all. 

It’s also nice for the mind to be somewhere so uncluttered. This doesn’t just apply to physical space: I, for one, miss when you would get a new phone and it would be completely blank, giving you the opportunity to start from scratch instead of carrying over everything from before. And, like everyone, I miss when summer was this blank, hazy space that stretched out indefinitely from the end of the school year, and I could spend the time lazily reflecting on the previous year. Maybe the absence of this freedom is the core of all of this, and moving during the summer makes this lack, and the mounting presence of responsibility, so much more apparent.

Perhaps this freedom still exists, but with a different face. Moving is a reminder that one can change, can restart whenever one wants. It’s a reminder of all the things that can be moved that you may have forgotten, including your own body. It’s true that this is cursed knowledge. Once you know you can move, especially once you have moved, effectively tossing all plaaes into the air, on comes the crush of decision. I’m reminded here of the post-credits scene of Finding Nemo: we see the fish from the dentist’s office having escaped at long last to the ocean. They bob up and down in their plastic bags, one of them says, “Now what?” They go silent, and the movie ends. 

But if narrative weight is self-imposed, maybe the weight of decision — the ultimate question of “What should I do with myself?”— can also be lightened and lifted. One has more time and capability than it seems. And of course, I don’t want to rid myself of all the drama. It’s a wonderful engine; it gives one momentum. So throughout this essay are pitcures of our old place: my way of giving it a small eulogy. Things are slowly shaping up here at our new place. We’re molding it into our image. And apparently, the sun keeps rising.

outside our new place, on the third day

1. this is the suburb of Nashville where M and I grew up, for those out of state

2. I’ve heard it’s good practice in writing short stories to end right before the real narrative ending, perhaps because leaving things more open ended is closer to real life than wrapping things up neatly. I’ve also been told that killing a character off is too easy, and things are more interesting if they stay around. Both of these ideas seem to say that narratives are “better” without an over-dramatic, closing-of-the-book ending.

Oh and I’ve been doing a lot of thinking on the killing off villains and how it relates to reader/viewer satisfaction. It’s always struck me as odd how the villain dies in many Disney movies, ones that are made primarily for children. Similar thoughts on the vague “taking villain to jail” ending. Is there no way to keep them in the same world as the hero? Are there better, more satisfying ways to end things? Expect a substack on this in the future :)