Something amazing happens when you move into a space. As you unpack your things, and place all your knick-knacks and posters and things about the room, setting up your furniture and plugging in your lamps and electronics. The room evolves, from a stark, empty space to something filled with as much personality as the person inhabiting it. Each item you place adds to this personality, giving it quirks, good and bad, changing the shape of the room, the way the light and sound move through it, the way a person moves through it.
This, I think, is the basis of Fung shui. It’s a beautiful process, like watching an artist creating a portrait, or watching a sculptor remove stone to reveal his statue. It can be done quickly, in a few hours, turning the room from a place into something personal, or it can progress, slowly, from simple inhabitation to truly living in the space. But it always happens the same way, as object builds on object, into something greater than the mere sum of the parts.
Realizing this makes packing a heartbreaking process of destruction.
I started with the videos, and dvds. It seemed as good a place as any to start, one shelf on my desk, placing each into a box, slowly filling one space while emptying another. When that box was full, I carried it downstairs and started a pile. Then I started on the books.
Maybe I should have left the books for longer, as they take up such a vast amount of space in the room, lending it so much of its personality. But, really, it was good to get the books done, and four boxes later, I moved on to the cds, then clothing, everything I wouldn’t be wearing for the week.
The room was slowly being stripped, becoming naked under the soft light of my Chinese lanterns. But it was still my room, still full of my personality, still soft and welcoming.
I took on the smaller things next, the things that served no purpose other than to please me, the little touches here and there that gave shape to the furniture and kept the eye from staying in a single place too long. More boxes were filled, more boxes were carried downstairs. More things were placed on the bed, to be placed in boxes, until finally, there were no little things left. Or at least, not many.
There were also no boxes left.
Minor panic attack, no more boxes?! How could I have run out of boxes? Those were the boxes I’d used to carry these things HERE in the first place, the boxes I’ve carried them in through countless moves over four years of college, literally in some cases. I don’t throw boxes out, not often at least, since I know for a fact I’ll be needing them sooner rather than later, to recreate a living space all over again, whether a few feet away, or a few hundred miles.
I took a deep breath. No boxes didn’t mean I was out of places to put things. I just had to get more creative.
Many of my things have hidey holes in them, hidden storage that means I place things there, then forget they exist for a long, long time. So I kept going, kept putting things on the bed then taking them off again to place in other things, in bags and cases and clocks (yes, clocks) and drawers, into odd little corners where they just barely fit.
The furniture, now, was truly becoming naked, only a few shelves holding items I still needed, or couldn’t quite bring myself to keep, but couldn’t seem to throw away either. And then it was time to move on from the furniture, and attack the walls.
I picked up my hammer, removing plates and mirrors and shelves and figurines, and then the nails which had held many of them up. I was leaving only small spaces, strips of white bare wall around the room, still liberally decorated with posters and tapestries.
And the room began to die.
Because the tapestries came next. I needed them to pad the often fragile things I’d taken from the walls, as I stuck them into those odd corners, and determined that yes, the trunk COULD hold more, or perhaps the suitcase or the backpack. And then whole walls were cleared, and the window bared, and the walls, hidden so deftly beneath a mass of color and pattern, returned.
The room seems both bigger and smaller at once. Bigger, as the clutter has been disappearing over the course of the week leaving empty spaces that haven’t existed since I moved in so many months ago.
And smaller, because you could see where the room stopped.
Right now, the room is dying. It’s barely holding on, gripping its posters and lamps and electronics as hard as it can, trying desperately not to let go (or, wait, that might be me). And I know that when I leave the room will be dead. The personality will be gone, crammed into boxes and then into cars, to be taken to a room that’s never died, not since my parents bought that house when I was six. A room I’ve never had to strip naked and expose to the cold light of a bare bulb.
But I’ll have to see the corpse of this room, which has been very kind to me since I moved in. I’ll have to see it empty and ashamed, marked where the furniture depressed the carpet, where the nails were hammered in.
I’ll have to spend my last night here, with the flat walls and stark, uncaring window.
. . . .
Well, I’m being entirely melodramatic. In fact, I rather like the bare room, sometimes. I prefer looking back on an empty space when I finally leave a place, letting me know I’ve left nothing behind, that the personality of a room can’t be recreated, but remembered in future rooms. That the room will be an empty canvas for whoever comes next, to turn the room into their own, and give it their own life.
After all, half the joy of art is in the creation.
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