Bare Cupboards. Bags. Memories.

Something about packing--about putting pieces of my life into an ordinary box, a bag--makes me contemplative, reflective, melancholy. The physicality, the logic of placing things inside other things, closing them, letting them go, sending them away...seems cold.

I deeply feel the emptiness of the walls, the lightness of the drawers as I open and close them, the bareness of the cupboards that still smell of turmeric...the signs that say we are leaving. I am not good at leaving.

And what about the things we won't pack into bags, wrapped carefully in dish towels and old newspapers? What about the nameless, numberless things we will leave behind? What we'll take in memory only--packed away, crowded with all the other bits and pieces we've collected with time?

I know this--this feeling coming around the bend: the fear that my memories will fade, the colors less bright, the language garbled, the sights and sounds and smells taking on the blurred edges of old dreams. But how else could I bear to keep them all?