In Storage

This weekend I borrowed Rebecca's car and put all the things I am not taking with me to camp back in storage. It has now been almost an entire year since I put it all there in the first place and I had a weird moment yesterday while I was standing on what used to be my desk reaching over the wall of boxes that divides the 10' x 15' space into the furniture section and the everything else section--something caught my eye that I did not recognize.

What is that big silver flower-shaped thing, I wondered as I reached over the box wall and probed it gently with my fingers, spinning it slowly around as I tried to understand what it was...oh! the rolling bottom of my IKEA desk chair, the seat pointing down towards the ground and the legs sticking straight up to the ceiling. Right. I have a desk chair, I have a desk. I have a kitchen table and an entire set of kitchen stuff including various appliances and some very nice knives that were a housewarming gift when I moved out of the House of Flowers into my own place on Judah Street. I have a bed that Renee found me on the street one thrift-shop field trip day, a brushed steel delight with a sign that said FREE but which she edited with Sharpie to say "$90!" because she thought that would prevent anyone from taking it until we came back from lunch and could summon the Subaru to come pick it up and take it to my house. I have a heinous eggplant-colored couch which is drenched in bad karma and needs to be burned at midnight on Ocean Beach once and for all. Clothes and books and fire extinguishers, lamps and towels and somewhere in there is a Swiffer.

As my plans for the fall are beginning to come together it is almost guaranteed that unless I want to subject myself to a completely nightmarish commute I will be living not in the city but here, in the East Bay. As I was walking up the stairs to Ben's apartment recently I thought about what it might be like to someday walk up the stairs to my own apartment again and I just can't even conceive of it right now but I know when it does happen, when I am seated on the floor of my own house again for the very first time surrounded by dozens of boxes of I don't even know what, clothes and books and fire extinguishers I suppose, I will be both stunned and grateful. It's been an amazing year and in some ways I don't want it to be over, I feel like there is so much more to see and do and learn but in other ways I just want to have a set of keys again that open my very own door...and not the door to a 10' x 15' storage space, either.