Dear Kate,
How was your move from Connecticut to Oregon? Moving is miserable. I hope you and Jared are alright.
I’ve been thinking about my own move from New York to Texas. I left in May with just two duffel bags and a suitcase. I threw away everything else: furniture, cups, plates, bowls, all of it.
I’m writing this to you from my Airbnb in Austin.
Love always,
Ali
A letter from my landlord came in the first week of May. My lease was up. After twelve weeks within four walls, alone, I didn’t have the endurance to renew. I wanted out. It was time to leave New York and retreat home to Texas. It wasn’t permanent, I told myself. I could always move back.
The decision to leave was easy.
The next decision was much harder: What would I do with all of my stuff?
I looked around my apartment. Tidy and bright, it was home to Saturday morning scrambled eggs, the burble of hot coffee, and the murmur of NPR. Now I surveyed my accumulated possessions with fresh eyes: shoes, clothes, pots, pans, books, magazines. Stuff was everywhere. Where had it all come from? Where would it go?
I moved to New York as a 20-year-old kid, with no plan, no connections—not even a good fake ID. I drained my savings on the security deposit for a five-floor walkup and a bed from Ikea. I had a job that paid $25 an hour. It took time to figure things out. The learning curve was steep, and it was expensive.
Bit by bit, I did it. My apartment eventually displayed the belongings of someone stable, responsible, and prepared. A spare set of guest sheets lay in the linen closet. Baking soda sat in the pantry. Fresh vegetables filled the fridge. Extra bottles of shampoo waited under the sink.
This stuff wasn’t just stuff. It was a physical representation of the painstaking effort required to build a life for myself. More importantly, it represented the painstaking efforts of others: the air conditioner my mom bought when I couldn’t afford one. The dishes she sent me, agave blue. The pots and pans she FedExed to my apartment to make sure I cooked and ate. The lilac blanket my dad bought from the Bed Bath & Beyond at Lincoln Center, despite his bewilderment at one store with three floors. Christmas gifts and birthday presents. Letters, love notes, and photos lined my shelves.
Where would it all go?
With boxes balanced in my arms, I walked to the derelict post office at 146th Street and Amsterdam. The line wrapped around three blocks. Reality hit. How far is six feet? I tried not to breath too much. My heartbeat picked up. Goosebumps stood at my neck. When I brushed past another person, touched a door handle, picked up a pen to sign the receipt, I worried: Would this be it?
As I walked home, I felt stupid. That wasn’t a risk worth taking. “It’s just stuff after all,” I said to no one. On paper, most of the items I owned weren’t worth the cost of postage, much less a U-Haul. Even if I did ship things back to Texas, where would they be stored? Who would use them? I didn’t know where I would live long term. Why would I need a comforter when I didn’t have a bed? Why would I need kitchen supplies when I didn’t have a kitchen?
And surely someone else could use the things I had. A Magic Bullet smoothie maker, a set of knives, a Pyrex baking dish. Could I donate them? Housing Works and Goodwill were closed. In May, New Yorkers were sheltering in place. The city was in crisis. I placed a few stacks of books, the kitchen tools, a desk, a lamp, and a chair in the lobby of my building, expecting to throw it all away later that afternoon. It was gone within the hour. 10 percent unemployment was taking its toll.
By the second week of May, friends started leaving New York. They packed up cars and drove away. Since many were driving back to parents in their sixties, it wasn’t safe to say goodbye.
The life I knew was ending. It wasn’t coming back.
It became clear that most of my items were going to have to go where I least wanted to send them: the garbage.
I filled trash bags with notebooks, decks of cards, curtain rods, picture frames, hair conditioner, skincare products, nail files, pillowcases, flower vases, t-shirts, high heels, dishtowels, and old soy sauce packets. It all went to the dumpster.
On moving day, my brother trekked from his apartment on the Upper East Side to mine in West Harlem to help with my furniture. What started as a valiant attempt to disassemble things slowly, using a screwdriver, turned into a reverie of destruction. We broke my Ikea furniture into bits and pieces, the particleboard coming apart in our hands. We hauled the detritus to the garbage pile outside. My brother said he got a splinter. I said he was a big baby.
I remember shopping for that furniture in 2016, wide-eyed at a store with its own zip code. My dad came along to help me measure things. We took the yellow Ikea ferry from Manhattan to Red Hook, and from Red Hook back to Manhattan, watching the city glimmer over the water. New York’s empire seemed to stretch forever. I checked my bank balance and felt like throwing up.
Now, it all sat in the trash.
By 5:00 pm, the apartment was empty. There was nothing left. My brother and I carried my last possessions—three duffle bags, a suitcase, and my Verizon cable box—downstairs to the front of my building. He stood with the bags and called an Uber. I ran back upstairs to lock the door.
Alone, I looked around the room. I began to panic. How would I afford to buy all of this again? Dishtowels cost money. Mattresses cost money. Curtain rods cost money. These were my things. I bought them. I worked hard to buy them. Would I ever come back to this place? I was happy here. Would I ever be happy again?
My brother texted: “Hurry up the Uber is here.”
I sat on the floor and cried.
If we’re not careful, our possessions can come to define us. We depend on them to reveal our worth. We depend on them to reveal what we’ve learned, who we are, and the story we’ve been writing.
What’s the value of an old t-shirt? Ostensibly nothing. It sits in your closet. It never had a price tag; you got it for free at a party in college. It’s been a long time since anyone has thought about Kappa Sigma’s 2013 Fall Rush.
But with a trash bag in one hand and that college t-shirt in the other, your stomach suddenly hurts. A pang of loss hits. The shirt tells you something about who you are—or, at least, who you were.
It’s difficult not to ask: Who am I without my stuff?
This question is a trap. Success and stability might be most easily measured through the accumulation of material wealth, but this is merely a vanity metric. Possessions are not our identity. The story of our lives is not told with $30 candles, $90 yoga pants, or even $0 t-shirts. It’s told by us.
It’s told each day we wake up, each chance we get to keep writing.