Numb

 I feel kind of blank tonight in addition to tired and out of sorts.   Earlier this evening I moved more stuff from my apartment where I have lived for the past 15 years to the family house downtown where I live now.   This particular night I carted away my stereo, a box of shells I had collected over the years at Folly Beach, and a giant framed landscape print that hung on my living room wall for all those years.   I remember when I was furnishing that bare apartment back in 1995 and I had nothing much to go on the walls, so I went to the Audubon Shop downtown and found this special print that seemed to call out to me.   It’s hard to explain.  Now it’s in the attic.  I have moved so  many boxes of books and other things I can’t part with.  Incrementally.  A little bit each day.   It isn’t so exhausting hat way.

This past weekend, a friend from work and her daughter and son-in-law came and hauled off  my beloved, deep cushioned, corduroy recliner chair that i had dozed off in after so many countless late nights spent on the computer.  That seemed to be my life back then.  Get up in the morning, check the Internet, go to work, come home and get back on the Internet to do countless mindless and some mindful things, chat, chat, chat to more people than I can ever recall, fix a snack, finally go to bed.   My God I wasted a lot of time.  But I’m thinking back also somewhat wistfully to that comfortable little apartment haven that is now just about completely bare — just like when I moved in with a couple of pieces of furniture and a few boxes of books.     The rate at which I accumulated things from that point on still astonishes me.  

As I walked up and down the stairs with boxes to be loaded in the car, I was cognizant every minute that next week at that time I would be gone from there for good.  No walking over to the laundromat, gazing at the majestic oak outside my window, taking walks in the nearby neighborhood, sitting in my study gazing at all the books on the shelves, happy for the silence and peace.

Hard to believe that I was still relatively young when I moved in there (44) and now, as I near by 61st birthday, I realize that not only is it the end of an era, but it’s also the beginning of a new stage of life.   I really feel more and more liberated from the past, though still captive to many of the worst memories.  Yet there is this distinct feeling of not just being in the home stretch of life, but of actually accepting and embracing it with full knowledge that I can be whatever kind of person I want to be where as in my youth I was never even remotely sure what that person was or was fated to  be.  Also, I have  no rent or mortgage and retirement is looming if I want it, but the daily obligations of caregiving and running this house fasten me to fixed routines and habits of living that  will be hard to break when the time comes when I have to do that and enter another state of life, that one the final stage.

Now that my past is compressed into many fleeting short memories, time is going by faster than it ever has.  At least in my perception of it, of course.   Some days it feels like the speed of light and I can’t slow down.  I have so many things to do, not  least of which is the hard work of a full time job.   I love being busy and embrace the quick passing of each day, but there is not nearly enough time now to quietly absorb the meaning of it all.  I must find that time.