There comes a time in every life when you must clean out the
closets, literally and figuratively. Today I did both.
I’m packing my home to move out of state to start a new job
and a new chapter in my life. This has come upon me very suddenly, requiring me
to make life altering decisions very rapidly over the past couple of weeks. Thankfully,
I only just moved into this house 5
months ago, so things are still in relatively good order. This week I’ve been systematically
making my way through the house, room-by-room, closet-by-closet, carefully determining
yet again which items I will carry with me in my car, which I will store for
the future, which I will donate to someone else, and which I will toss for
good. Most decisions have been easy: I carried this item to this house but
haven’t used it in 5 months—it needs to go to a new home now. Or, this item is
too precious to decide more than once: it stays in my life forever.
But let’s be real. I don’t own anything of significant
monetary value. I’m a furniture/decorating minimalist and anyone who has met me
knows I’m no fashionista; my most valuable household assets consist of a
collection of overpriced gluten free flours, a few too many specialized kitchen
appliances, far more personal electronic gadgets than one woman needs, and a
robust (completely legal and paid-for, thank you very much) music collection.
No, my precious items fall more in the “sentimental value” realm than requiring
extra insurance coverage. So as I started to pack up my home once again this
round, I thought that I had reached the point in life where I knew which items were
deemed eternally valuable and therefore didn’t require additional evaluation.
While cleaning out the closets I learned I was wrong.
Tucked in the back of my bedroom closet I found them: the collection
of stuffed animals that had been a part of Charles’ and my life together. They
moved from our old apartment in North Hollywood into my new house in Monrovia,
because I wasn’t ready to deal with them yet. They’re big kids—took up a whole
moving box of their own—but I’ve had plenty of room in this house all by myself
so they never bugged me much. This move is different. I’m relocating to Seattle
and leaving my personal belongings in storage in California until I figure out
where I’m going to live up there. Space in my car is reserved for (of course)
my gluten free flours and a few clothes. Space in my storage unit is costing me
by the square foot so it no longer makes sense to keep things around that I’m
not ready to deal with yet. Today I had to deal with them.
I sat the stuffed animals on my bed and had a good, long
talk with them. Yes, you can just call me crazy right now. I was never a
stuffed animal guru until I met Charles, but he had this talent for drawing out
the personality of non-human things. Stuffed animals, live animals, cars, and
computers all seemed to come alive and gain a voice under his influence. So it
was with these old, beat up, smelly stuffed animals now propped up on my
bed. We talked about what had happened since Charles’ death two years ago, how
they had seen me through the first few lonely months, how they had laughed when
I tried to start dating again and didn’t know what I was doing. We
talked about how I had been able to leave them to their own devices for a long
time, and as a matter of fact hadn’t bugged them at all since I moved into this house. Then we talked about how my life
is going in directions now that they just can’t come with me. They will always
be a sweet memory of that period with a very funny man, but they don’t belong
to my future. We cried together and said goodbye. Although it was sad, it was
also very, very refreshing because I knew I had cleaned out another emotional
closet.
On the eve of the second anniversary of Charles’ passing, I
am struck by the changes which have occurred in my life and my heart in the
past two years. This encounter with the stuffed animals was indicative of the
emotional upheavals I’ve been experiencing these past two weeks since I made
the decision to take this new job and close a 16-year chapter of my life in Los
Angeles. Of course this chapter has been all about Charles. He’s the reason I
moved here in the first place. What’s interesting, though, is that during the
past two years without him, it has
become even more important to me to feel like this is my place and my home. I
think I had to learn to love this as my own
home in order for me to accept that my life is moving on, post-Charles. I
always say that life is all about timing, and this seems to be the right time
for everything that is happening for me: time to start a new job, time to move
to a new home, time to start a new blog about those adventures, time to clean out the closets.
