The Expat Offers Some Packing Advice

By Jennifer Saunders

You will never be finished.
You will never be finished
because you don’t even know what you’ll need.
You can’t guess what you will miss
until you are missing it like a limb.
So don’t stand there in your living room
surrounded by love letters and text books,
agonizing over what to pack.
You will always pack too much
and too little.

(Look up.
It is the view from that window you will miss,
the ragged pine tree
and the squirrel you lured to your sill
with peanut butter crackers—
but you can’t possibly know that now
so I am telling you:
that view is what you will miss.)

You will pack all the wrong things
and some of the right ones.
You could fill a shipping container,
and you will,
and still you will discard
the thing you should have held
and hold the thing that weighs you down.

And you could stand on the threshold
of your empty apartment all afternoon
watching a square of light
travel across the hardwood floor,
unable to shut the door behind you
because you know you are forgetting
something
but you can’t think what it is
and still it will never come to you.
It will never come to you
because you can’t know what you will miss
until you are missing it.
So learn this now:
you will miss all of it.

It is time to close the door.


Previously published in Blast Furnace, Volume 1, Issue 2