6) The Cardboard City

“That sounds like you’ve been doing a lot of processing… Do you have any idea what that may mean?” Asks your good friend. You had told her about that vivid studio dream.

“Yes actually. I had thought about this. I think that my messy, mostly packed studio represents my life here in St Petersburg. It’s coming to an end but I’m not quite ready to leave… I feel like someone else packing me up is me knowing that my time here is ending and not quite being able to sever myself from it all. And the coyote that I had to run past or jump over to get out? That coyote was every single one of my fears, blocking that door, which is really just the next chapter of my life.”

You’ve been working on that… all those fears. The ‘what ifs’ your brain loves to obsessively pluck from every single one of life’s most terrible scenarios, then feed to you like rotted cherries. You decide that you will start journaling every night. Your brain might be feeding you bad fruit, but maybe you could just toss that aside and pick your own damn cherries instead?

As the days continue to dwindle, new boxes appear. Single stacks turn into cardboard towers that creep in from the walls, up they soar and when the tower gets too high a new one is started just in front. A small city has risen up between your side of the bed and your grandfather’s old work bench. Packed boxes, empty boxes, bags filled with packing materials. Initially when you’d wake up at night to use the bathroom, the room pitch dark, navigated purely by muscle memory, your shin would crash into a freshly stacked tower. You joke with a friend that by the time all this packing and moving is done, your legs and hips will be one giant bruise.

A week in though and the little city has been etched into your brain. You can wake up at night and quietly, stealthily, sneak through the urban paper sprawl without incident. You marvel at your adaptability.

You’re sleeping better now too. No more tossing and turning at night, no more waking up in a cold sweat wrapped in panic.

Things aren’t getting any easier though. You’re at that point where each time you see an old friend, or cross paths with a neighbor, or drive through an area of the city… you know it’s a goodbye.

Lots of long hugs. Lots of tears. Promises to keep in touch. A good friend even told you that he felt honored for you to have come into his life… you tell him that you feel the same way about him, the tears flowing down your cheeks. You both said you wouldn’t cry, and here are the two of you, laughing and crying… doing some really hard stuff.

Through it all you feel like you’re disassembling something… a half a lifetime, packing it all up into your ever expanding city. Box, by box, by box. You wrap memories like precious gifts, knickknacks are wrapped in old newspaper. And yet with all the disassembling… you know that you’re simutaneously building something too.

You think of your own neighborhood. Not a single new house when you had moved here. Little old single story bungalows built in the 1950s. Now though old houses disappear, taken apart for a new McMansion that sprouts up, taking over nearly the entire plot of land, two stories towering over the decades old, no frills modesty that used to be the status quo. You’ve watched the houses come down, you and your kids perched on an opposite sidewalk watching the excavator expertly plucking entire electrical systems from the old home. It reminds you of a fisherman cleaning his catch, the guts of a stiff wide eyed fish unceremoniously pulled from its body and tossed into the water below.

Then the real processing would start on a corner of the home where the excavator would go to work. You had expected more the first time… maybe the bucket would struggle to break through the bungalow’s old roof? Or maybe the house would give way in one final sigh before crashing to the ground, dust and soot covering everyone in the nearby vicinity. Except that’s not how it ever happened. Slowly the bucket would cut through the old home like a knife through cake… each bite served up to the mouth of the massive waiting dumpster. There was nothing epic about the demolition, rather just a slow consuming of the old to make way for the new. And by the time the new was there, you had long forgotten the old… was that house yellow or blue?

Now you were doing the same, a slow breaking down, making way for the new owners and your new chapter. Time to pass the torch. No grand explosions, no earth trembling dusty collapse… just a slow cut through your old life. The contents: turned into a sprawling city of precariously stacked cardboard.

You close on your home in three days.