"Boxes"

I like packing boxes to move. To some people this is like saying I enjoy root canals sans anesthesia or waiting rooms occupied by crying babies. But these people are usually disorganized or the sort who, despite moving multiple times a year, have never built up the immunity that their fellow apartment-hoppers have.

I guess it's because I hate the feeling of being unmanaged, and nothing says efficiency like a room reduced to a few boxes on the floor. It's thrilling, somehow, organizing things and labeling the cardboard- the ability to take twenty novels, twenty different worlds, and write "books" makes me feel godlike.

Looking at all those taped-shut collections gives me the same thrill of anticipation as the moment after I've bumped into someone, before I know who they are or how I'll react. It could be a sixty-four year old woman who's about to take a vicious swing at me with her alligator-skin purse. But it might be a cute kid my age who I'm going to elope with and live in the south of France.

You never know exactly where you're going. Both situations cause the same flutter of excitement in me, the flurry of imagination.

From a different angle, the packing experience could be depressing. You could look at the car full of boxes, the list of fifty people to send your new address to and think, "This is what it all comes down to." But this isn't pessimism so much as a tendency to fixate on the "before," an inability to peer forward into the dizzying chances of "after."

You can't sit down and make a list of every possible outcomes for your life, just like you can't calculate the odds that you exist, rather than some clone of you whose eyes are just one shade darker. Funny, then, that it's so impossible to let your own life go to chance.