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Tonight’s my last night sleeping in this bed, in this room. It’s 3:30 in the morning and I’ve been packing and I just took a shower, because I had been crawling around under the bed and I was just absolutely filthy, like stinky filthy. I feel better now because I’m cleaner, but I’m swinging toward the sad end of the sad/excited pendulum.

I’m off from work tomorrow and all next week, and I worked until 8 tonight because I felt like there was so much to do. And then there’s so much to do here, still, even after I spent the last five or six hours working. And tomorrow I have to get up and go to the insurance agency and the U-Haul place and Goodwill and Target, and I have to get dishes out of the shed and clean the bathroom and strip the bed and wash the bedding, because my grandparents will be here tomorrow, which is why I won’t be sleeping in this bed again because they sleep in here when they visit. I’m not sure where I’m sleeping for the next few days. Maybe on the couch. On Saturday, Sammi is graduating, and oh by the way that’s why I bought the black and white dress a few days ago – to wear to that. And then there’s dinner afterward, and then on Sunday I have to drive over to Lynchburg to get the townhouse keys and then we’re having a barbecue here, and then Monday morning we have to get up early and go get the truck and come back and load it and move. I’m not entirely sure why we thought it was a good idea to move me out two days after Sammi graduates from high school, but it’s too late to go back now.

I’m packing and I’m at that stage where I’m left with a bunch of crap I’m not sure I want, but can’t bear to get rid of, and it doesn’t really go in any room and it doesn’t really fit in boxes and I consider just throwing it away, but I can’t make myself do it, so instead I start throwing shit in boxes all willy-nilly, like I’m packing the pen cup on my desk exactly as is – pens and all – and cramming in a bunch of stuff around them so that they don’t spill. And my first few boxes of clothes were neatly folded and labeled and sorted by type, but now I’ve got sweaters and underwear and old jeans and work blouses all dumped in the same box, and then I might randomly also put, like, a book and some old birthday cards in that box too, and maybe a lamp as well. And then instead of writing “summer t-shirts, upstairs, bedroom” on the box in Sharpie I’m just scrawling “UPSTAIRS” somewhere on the box.

In my closet are a couple of boxes I brought back from college, and I haven’t looked in them for a long time, so I opened them to see what I’d keep and what I’d put in the Goodwill bag. In the bottom of one of them I came across my bodysuits and my white gloves and my performance shoes that I think I last wore at the Alamo Bowl in San Antonio in 2000. I put on a pair of the gloves to get back a specific feeling. It’s like, when you put on the gloves, it’s time to perform. I can’t explain it. Putting them on again was sad. And then I got the performance shoes out of the very bottom of the box, and I remembered how I never liked this pair as much as the pair I got in high school and wore until they literally began to fall apart. This pair didn’t fit my heels right, and I came off the field from a pregame show once to find that my feet were actually bleeding. But I looked at them tonight and I saw that they still have field paint on them, from the last show I ever marched in Dyche Stadium. And no matter how much I hated those shoes, I’m never throwing them away.

I should know that this feeling will go away, that I get like this every single time I move, because my heart always expands to surround the places I call mine.