Moving Boxes Paid in Friendship

Moving is the universe’s way of punishing you for your complete inability to resist the temptations of capitalism.
By “you,” I mean my friend.
And by “my friend,” I mean my friend, her mother, and her three sisters.
The boxes in the garage smiled down at me like I was the over confident superhero in a kid’s story facing her first real opponent. I even had the too big sunglasses and bright colored top so I never blended into the background characters.
But that’s more modern day fashion’s fault than my own. The fashion industry concerns itself a lot with the completion of my quests. We’re tight like that.
The boxes and I are not tight like that. The boxes decided, even before I made my way up the drive, that we were not going to be friends and that they would use all of their power to guarantee I hated them back.
They popped open from the bottom. They looked heavy when they actually weighed about as much as a house cat, and they looked light when they actually weighed somewhere between a small cow and those trucks that come by at 4 am to take the trash cans. Stupid trucks.
They tetrised themselves into place, and then promptly fell out once we turned our backs. These boxes were out for vengeance. We must have used their mother as a trash box once because they had no time for compromise and cooperation. They wanted blood.
The might of the modern human could not be stymied by petty cardboard boxes though, and we piled them high into the van before eventually giving up on any idea of order and tossing it all on top of each other.
Order is for people who have their lives together. Order is for people who wake up at 5 am, drink something green and filled with little, also early rising vitamins, and then proceed to spend the day telling you they did so.
I am the kind of person who wakes up in the vicinity of morning and proceeds immediately to the coffee pot. Order is for other people.
I’m also the person who gets freaked out if my entire life can’t fit into a few suitcases and my car. Anything greater than that seems like a high level of commitment I am not ready for. I can’t handle the external pressure of a hamster. You think I can handle a life that requires me to rent a moving van? No. The correct answer is no.
Staring at my friend’s and her family’s life compressed into a van (their third one of this moving trip, by the way), I couldn’t tell what was important and what wasn’t. To me, it was all random, disconnected pieces of a house. The toss-able looked the same as the necessities, and it went both ways.
The piles of necessities in my life are piles of random junk to anyone else looking at them. Everyone’s junk pile carries itself a little differently.
I only wish they’d had less.
My legs doubly so.
Stay friendly.
-Anne
