Packing

It is now two o'clock in the morning. I have been packing for more or less thirteen hours now, and I still keep finding nooks and drawers I haven't cleared out yet. I have taken to simply throwing out useful items and possibly valuable documents simply to save room. How did I ever allow myself to get so much crap? Some of these things can't possibly be mine. A pair of women's shoes, a Jewish calender from 2006, entirely too many hand towels. I suspect conspiracy.

I am drinking soggy powdered Gatorade mix out of a soup bowl. Part of me is dimly aware that this is the lowest I've sunk in a while, but I'm too busy gleefully stuffing pristine unread magazines into trash bags to care. There is something vaguely cathartic about getting rid of excess possessions so spitefully. It simultaneously shuns one's inner consumerist packrat and environmentalist snob. I secretly hope that the half-full jugs of detergent explode on the trash barge in the summer heat, or that the empty bottles of cleaning products melt and drip down through the landfill to mate with something poisonous and scientific.

In a couple days I leave for India. Feels like less. Dad called to tell me that the BBC is reporting on huge, monsoon-born floods displacing twenty million people around the region I'll be heading too. It's been thunderstorming here for five hours now, taunting me. The weather in this city can be so fucking smug sometimes.