The Most Psychologically Stressful Part of Packing

... has been deciding which books to take along, and which to leave behind. Anyone to whom this comes as a surprise doesn't know me at all. 

It's really upsetting, because books seem so deceptively packable: so small, so wonderfully rectangular. But they weigh a ton, and I'm flirting with the fifty-pound weight limit on my two bags to be checked as it is. Hence, I'm going to be that weird girl in the airport carrying roughly twenty books in her carry-on. I amuse myself by imagining what a conversation with a curious neighbor during my layover in O'Hare might sound like: "Yes, these are all for the flight. Well, you see, I'm a very fast reader." 

I think I've settled on a smattering of the American classics: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, To Kill A Mocking Bird and my very well-loved copy of Little Women. I have no great love of Huck Finn or The Catcher in the Rye, so they can stay here. I'd like to add a couple of more contemporary representatives—McCarthy, maybe, or Middlesex or The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. My John Irving collection was eyeing me expectantly just now. But there are a few non-American essentials that take precedence by merit of sentimental value: Wuthering Heights, as I've mentioned in a previous post; Jane Eyre and any one of several Virginia Woolf works. My Barnes & Noble paperback edition of Pride and Prejudice might not survive the journey, but it's coming too. Additionally, I have a trans-Atlantic reading of Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses planned, and I really ought to give Infinite Jest a crack because I may never have such ample free time again...

Well, I could go on and on with in depth analyses of every book on my bookshelf, whether it's coming and why. But the point is that I don't have room for every book I might conceivably want, maddening as it is. Most, if not all, of these books are coming purely for emotional support, anyway, as I fully intend to get to work on my German reading list as soon as I can find my way to a bookstore. 

Nevertheless, I will probably spend a good couple of hours tonight packing and unpacking and repacking and making changes to the lineup. And I may find myself in Germany, begging my parents to ship over something I left behind that suddenly seems absolutely essential. These are all things future generations whose exposure with the written word is exclusively digital won’t have to worry about. But I like my paper-and-ink books, dammit, and I want them. They just won’t fit in my bags.

#First world problems.

A Few Thoughts About Packing

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.