Moving Places

The moments race to become memories in the blink of an eye...and like Tennessee Williams said, that is what Life is...Life is all Memories….Just Memories. 

It's good to start a new year with new beginnings but we seldom realize that to make a new beginning we must also end some things. To make a beginning is to make an end and that is the most painful part about new beginnings. 

I close another window shut and seal it. I look in the kitchen cupboards and clear out all the half filled jars.  I go through the To Do lists and tick off the tasks. I go through the wardrobes and check again to see if I missed packing anything important that we must take. 

The rooms all seem bare, the cupboards look like hollowed out shells, the kitchen shelves have empty bottles and jars that stand forlornly. I open another cupboard and just like that in the middle of all that I am doing, a lump forms in my throat and my eyes well up with unshed tears. 

This task of moving places has been one I've gone through again and again. Yet, the only thing that has become easier with time is the flow of the tasks to be done, with mechanical precision. Emotionally, it still takes a toll as if this were the first move I ever made. 

This uprooting, this packing and trying to leave nothing of importance behind, seems like such a lost cause to begin with. In reality, we leave such important parts of ourselves in each place that we move away from. In these places, we called Homes, we have lived, we have loved, we have laughed and we have cried and the walls of our homes stand mute witnesses to all that we have enjoyed and endured. 

Yet, when we move, we hope to pack everything...and yet, we leave a little and sometimes a lot of ourselves behind...We leave a part of ourselves in all the places we leave, with all the people we meet, love and leave.  Bit by bit that is how we enrich our lives with memories and that is how we shed a part of ourselves everywhere we move...till we belong everywhere and belong nowhere...and so the cycle continues...