I say, half-jokingly, that if my mother had had her way I
would have been living out of a suitcase for the last two weeks. But the truth
is I’m lucky my mom is the Type-A, plan-ahead kind of person that she is, because,
left to my own devices, I would be sitting here, now just two days away from
boarding my plane, staring at empty suitcases.
I’m not a procrastinator by nature— quite the opposite: in
college, I was the weirdo who wrote papers a week before they were due and did
most of her weekend reading on Saturday morning. But I’ve missed almost every
deadline in this whole Fulbright process, and I refused to even acknowledge my
suitcases’ presence until the day before last, even though they were sitting on
the bed in my brother’s vacated room—the “staging area,” as my mom likes to
call it—open and half-packed for a week before that. This isn’t the first time
I’ve noticed this about myself: confronted with monumental change, I prefer to
push it to the back of my mind, as though banishing it there will mean it
doesn’t exist. Of course, that’s never the case, and more often than not my
denial only results in more panic and anguish at the last minute. I know this,
yet I do nothing about it, and the cycle continues—procrastinate, panic,
procrastinate, panic. I can’t help but worry about what will happen to me when
I’m on my own in Germany with nobody to keep me in line but myself.
One curious side effect of this whole packing process is
that it has turned me, usually the most reluctant of shoppers, into a shopping
machine. Last night my mom and I went out to look for a few last-minute
essentials, and we wound up buying what feels like a whole new wardrobe. In
theory, it’s a wardrobe for the post-graduate me, an upgrade from the
jeans-and-t-shirt look that has been my MO for the past four years. But when I
spread a few of our purchases out on my bed last night—a black trench coat, a
form-fitting grey dress, a pair of black ankle-boots—they seemed more like
things that belonged to someone else, that had showed up in my shopping bag by
mistake. But I guess that is, in a sense, the point.
I’ve always had a sort of mystified reverence for the
transformative power of clothes. As a child I spent hours dressing up in old
dance costumes out of an over-stuffed trunk we kept in our basement, playing
princess as five-year-old girls are wont to do. What I’m doing now is, in
principle, the same, the only differences being that this time it’s not
make-believe, and instead of princess, I’m playing the part of self-assured,
sophisticated world traveler. I recognize that there’s a certain unhealthiness to
this pattern of thinking, in believing that, if I just have that right pair of
shoes, all my problems will be solved; or that, if I can just look the part, no one will be able to
see through the charade. But I’m getting too old to buy into the idealistic
myth that appearance doesn’t matter in this world. And who knows? Maybe, if I
can convince others, I can convince myself as well.
Another thing that packing is making me realize is that when
you’re trying to fit your entire life into two suitcases, there’s very little
room for sentimentality. I feel like I could fill an entire suitcase just with my
favorite books and mementos, things to scatter around my apartment in Frankfurt
and to serve as talismans against homesickness. But I don’t have that luxury:
even sticking to just the essentials, clothes and shoes and a few toiletries,
I’m already running out of space. I’m constantly trying to remind myself that
what I’m after is a fresh start, that over the course of my ten months in
Germany I’ll accumulate new books and
new mementos.
But I also know that, in the final frenzy tomorrow, a few
things will find their way into a suitcase, stowaway style: a leather-bound
edition of Wuthering Heights, a
certain painting (hey, it’s flat anyway!), a T-shirt bearing a picture of
Martha Graham wearing a raspberry beret. And I won’t beat myself up about that.
Not all things are just things. We’re
not that different as adults than we are as kids clinging to a favorite stuffed
animal. Some of our possessions serve as anchors, to remind us of who we are,
where we’ve been, and what is important to us.
Packing it all up into two suitcases just helps to clarify
which are the things that are closest to home.
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