disarray

So my apartment lacks things. The kitchen is still intact, but the books and clothes have been moved downstairs. This is driving me crazy. I feel restless in the place. It's already a small apartment. It is even less interesting without any things in it.

The B returns on Wednesday afternoon; we'll move my furniture downstairs that night. Then I teach Thursday, and from there we're bound for Wisconsin. We have a day or so to pack his things and see which of our grad school cast-offs will be making the trip to the mitten. The coffee table from the ROTC's old room that we danced on during several Highland Christmas parties and then decoupaged with literary magazine rejection slips, the one with the leg that is always falling off despite the fact that Lizard has fixed it a few times, is probably not going to make it. It had a good run, though.

Then packing a truck, then driving back here, then unloading it. And then I will have to physically restrain myself from unpacking and arranging and buying new shit all on top of the last week of classes. Which won't happen, of course. Instead, I will not do the work that needs to be done until the very last minute, and in the meantime I will be pacing in the new place, feeling very, very anxious about bookshelves and dimensions and waning to hang things. And then I'll probably pick a fight with the B. Ah, moving!

Even some really good books--books that I was so excited about two months ago, when I was drowning in the semester's portfolios and finals--can't hold my attention right now. Neither can making something terribly ambitious in the kitchen, or going for long runs. My old tricks are useless.

So instead it's a beautiful Sunday, breezy and in the high sixties, and I'm sitting in my office, which smells of Taco Bell beans, with drawn shades and a smuggled animal. But at the very least, I'm out of the house and not rattling around the rooms, reaching for a book that's no longer on a shelf or a dish that's already been packed.