Moving once, moving twice, moving thrice? I seriously need to look at my life and look at my choices, because between Friday of last week and the time I leave for Kyrgyzstan in three weeks, I’ll have packed and unpacked my life a total of three times. That’s a lot of time to look at just how much stuff I’ve managed to accumulate in six years living on the East Coast.
Tag: Packing
Two Weeks Left in DC
The countdown is getting real – there’s exactly one month left until I pull the final zipper shut on my duffels and, very casually, hop a plane to Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. This countdown also happens to mean that I have only two weeks left in my current home of Washington, DC, where I have lived since September. I’ve got to do everything… take the GRE, sell my furniture (done), somehow dispense with my large collection of books, throw away a lot of useless trinkets, pack up the ones I like, and work my last week in the office before that. And that’s before I get my ducks in a row back at my parents’ house in Seattle, visit family in California, and then finally put the things I need into the duffels that will have to carry me through the 27 months in a place that, so far, looks just as beautiful as I’ve imagined.
A Preparation
Leaving home is never easy. Leaving a home and knowing that you are leaving your community for good is even harder. This was my life this week as I packed up my 6th and final dormitory room from my four years of university over the course of eight hours the morning after I graduated. In frantic runs to the ZipCar and the storage unit, one Lululemon bag after another piled up in boxes and in my temporary room that I am occupying until Thursday. It is from this pile that I will carefully select the 20 kilos of belongings that will travel with me on the two-day journey to Dushanbe. By 20 kilos, of course, we really mean 15, because I will buy at least 5 more kilos of gifts and souvenirs while I am in Tajikistan, I’m sure.
With family and friends punctuating each day, I wonder to myself how will this departure, as not a side-note to a larger university education or job, but rather a transitional interlude between chapters, will register in my mind. Is this an end or a beginning? Or is this somewhere in the middle? Too many farewells have taken place in the past three days to call it exclusively a beginning, but too much is about to happen to call it exclusively an end.
I guess I’ll just have to live in the middle for now. The middle of my piles of things, that is.