Things They Don’t Tell You About Moving Away
It’s not a coming of age nostalgic moment like in the movies. It’s more like the past 3 years of your life threw up all over your floor and you have to clean it up. I guarantee that you will stare blankly at all your crap and feel overwhelmed. Like ugly cry Kim Kardashian style and question everything that’s happening in your life right now. Am I making the right decision to move away? Does my whole life really fit into a few boxes? Will my friends miss me? Replace me? Important stuff like that.
You’ll stack your records and CDs and remember the soundtrack to last summer. It was good then. It was kind of perfect. It went by way too fast.
Find old photos and immediately time travel back to those moments. Feeling them. Wishing you could have them back. And that if you knew that you’d be where you are now you might’ve done things a little differently. You might’ve stayed up a little later, talked a little more, laughed harder, caught a few more lighting bugs. But there are no do overs now so you’ve gotta hang on to what you’ve got left of those shoulda-coulda-wouldas.
You’ll most likely procrastinate and try to buy more time. A lot more time (runs to fridge and devours pint of ice cream). But soon you’ll have to stop being all in your feelings like the weathered Nicholas Sparks paperback you just found shoved in the corner of your bookshelf and actually pack. Sifting through the nonsense like the memories that they are, keeping the good and (hopefully) throwing away the bad. Unless you have attachment issues:
Old love letters from boy that’s still your friend. Keep.
Box of postcards from all the places you’ve been, not yet full of all the places you want to go. Keep.
Crumpled receipt from gas station. Throw away–wait, keep. That was from the night you climbed the roof, and almost died. Memorable.
First script you ever wrote. Keep.
Movie stub from date night. Throw away (bad date night).
When your done sorting, sifting, purging, or whatever the heck you wanna call it, you should be proud. Proud that you just went through all life’s crap and conquered it. Well, sort of.
Truth is I’ve loaded up my car with all these boxes and I’m not ready. I’m not ready to say goodbye to Nashville, to my friends, to the late night movie marathons and rooftop adventures. And I’ve realized that maybe we never really are ready. Maybe we’re just on auto pilot until things start to seem a little more familiar and a little less foreign. Maybe that’s when we know we’ve made the right decision, maybe that’s when we know we’re home.
