THE NARRATIVE ARC
Test Your Friendship — Move a Mattress
Lifting furniture makes a handy metaphor for intimacy
I moved eight times between 2010 and 2019.
The bank foreclosed on my childhood home in 2009, and while my parents managed to forestall the process for a year, we moved out in August 2010 — just a few days before my 20th birthday. I’ve moved every year since.
Every move, I called “the friend with a truck.”
You know the one — he’s good-natured, easy to bribe, owns a pickup.
Mine was Ricky. Like many a friend with a truck, he knew how to efficiently pack the unwieldy, largely worthless belongings of a twenty-something into the bed of a pickup. Every year, he showed up with his truck, I would load it up, and he would take me to my new home.
Prior to 2014, I moved like a refugee. I was forced to beg everyone in my circle who would take me in rent-free for a few months at a time. I still have a hard time expressing the desperation, the humiliation, I felt at the time. Suffice it to say, it was distressing for me (as well as my 16-year-old brother, who was in my care for 2013). I felt crushed by impossible pressures, both internal and external. For weeks before every move, I wandered through my own life like a ghost…
