FROM THE CLOUDS ❖ Moving notes from a quasi-hoarder

an unedited ramble about stuff that makes up who we are

Claude Monet, Grainstacks (1890)

The thing that is exhausting about moving houses/countries is facing the steady trickle of your selfhood you’ve accumulated over time now rushing suddenly like a tidal wave through a pinhole. The reality that presents itself is that who you are is not much more than a series of micro-decisions stacked one on top of the other: sometimes you make them very slowly and consistently over years in the same sharehouse-workplace-city-language-set-of-friends, and every now and then when you move, you have the luxury of revising them all in the one fell swoop, even choosing to blow over the whole stack.

One of my most slothful vices is a bent towards nostalgia. I am not a minimalist: I pile things on rapidly and impulsively. And now when I move my back pays the price, curved into a question mark as I sit on the floor sorting through my shelves, asking: “Do I really still need this?”. Through this process the anonymous sludge of shelf-stuff clarifies into moments in time I can almost, almost recall. I get pulled this way and that by the forceful currents of these memories. And I wonder: what was I trying to be here, that I acquired and then held on so insistently to this thing, only for it to mold (literally, in the inner west of Sydney, mold) amongst the rest of my detritus til this moment where I decide to finally let this micro-ambition about myself go (staring at a box of paints, platform heels, and a book about the history of precision engineering)?

The hoarder is an animal of good intents — an excess of them, and too little to show for it.

My sister had once posited as an explanation for my mum’s hoarding that “she sees the potential in all objects across all of time and space” which, actually, feels like the way that I experience most of life, except about different things like words and memories and things people say and ideas. It sure is fortunate that gravity and matter works the way that it does, otherwise I’d be afraid of being dragged along the floor by the sheer weight of inane crap I file away into interminable storage in my head.

Anyway, I have always loved endings too much. I love the way the way that finality imbues the intervening moments between one’s awareness of an end and the end itself with the blooming vividness that I forget life can have on all other kinds of days.

I spend all of my time planning and so when it comes to an end, there is a distinct sharpness to the sensation of having nothing left to plan, it’s like how the sudden whiff of a perfume bursts your train of thought in a pleasant way. I stand face to face with all of my unachieved ambitions and square myself solely in the humility of the moment, which turns out to be richer than I had given it credit for. Every seed I had already planted which I had never bothered to count has grown. I had spent so much time worrying about all the seeds I hadn’t.

I savour the end, I am privately melodramatic and imagine myself like those dogs who crawl out of sight away from their loved ones to die, figuratively anyway. I like to take one last sniff of the old flowers and sprinkle sunflower seeds haphazardly along the path before I go. I’ve always taken my time to leave places, walking around the canals of Zurich very slowly listening to Daniel Caesar, thinking of the strangers I made into friends, and into strangers again. I remember when in Zurich my boyfriend at the time told me how much he hated Bob Dylan, which almost made me cry, and then a few years later I saw that he had included a clip of him singing Don’t Think Twice It’s All Right by Bob Dylan on his demo reel, which we had listened to on our last day together eating freshly-baked cinnamon rolls on a purple bed in London, which almost made me cry.

There’s a particular irony in the way I am moving now, because I know I am someone who likes new things too much, and always will, but ironically I’m moving closer to my partner in the hope of being more firmly grounded in something that would indeed just stay. Underneath my performance about independence, I am yearning to be depended on, and to depend on someone, too. And there is a whole song and dance you can do about not truly needing anyone, or never letting someone else redirect the destined currents of your life. But maybe you can only keep up this charade before you haven’t found someone safe enough to admit you really depend on: because, ugh, we all do need others (romantic or not).

I’d said in therapy I was afraid of doing anything, or loving anyone forever! Even first dates were terrifying because they opened up the possibility of hemming in my life to some fate that lasts forever. And she said well I have good news for you, because none of it is.

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