I wasn’t just packing and purging. I was curating.
“That’s a good free box, if I do say so myself. I’d be thrilled to happen upon that box if I walked by it.” For the past three weeks since we’ve signed the lease on a new apartment, I’ve been repeating this to Stephen ad nauseum, now more a recurring bit to annoy him than anything else.
The box in question is very large, wider than it is deep, cardboard. One whose flaps I plan to sharpie “FREE” on when it’s ripe for placing outside. I can tell it’s already so heavy that it’s going to be impossible to pick up off the floor, but it’s still not ready. The recent union strike and subsequent weeks-long recycling and trash pickup delay in Philly was not the time anyway to be littering the sidewalk with more junk.
I picked this box specifically for its shallow depth, so all I have to offer is laid bare for the wandering eye. Its contents are teeming with items from our 20s and 30s like a time capsule, including but not limited to: an Absolut bottle sheared clean of its bottleneck and absolutely brimming with costume jewelry from nanas and aunts and long-ago flea markets, not one but two Harry Potter-themed mugs packed tightly with virgin colored pencils I never touched to paper, a Monopoly board game (because why play the game when we’re all living it?), two paintings I crafted myself – an ugly, abstract rendering of the Schuylkill River from those early 20-teens Paint N’ Sip nights, and a silhouette of the Philly skyline melting into some monstrous rainbow underworld that I covered an actual painting with – and a cyclist’s starter kit, complete with a baby blue women’s bike helmet, handlebar tape, and spare tubes.
It was during this last assembly of items when the gravity of the past four years hit me. I wasn’t just packing and purging. I was curating.
I could have tossed all of this shit in a deep, uninspired box willy-nilly and called it a day. I could have stuffed the leather mini skirts and silk dresses and tasteful work pants in a garbage bag and dropped it in a donation bin, but instead I neatly folded the items in a shopping tote and gifted them to my girlfriends at work. I could have literally shredded every single last page of the screenplays I wrote while at the formerly-accredited UArts, instead of hand-selecting the best and final drafts and tossing the rest: character bibles and beat treatments scribbled with my professors’ notes.
I wonder what happened to them when the school closed down. But that is no longer my concern. Nor is the fact that I couldn’t zip the aforementioned leather mini skirts and tasteful work pants past even my thighs, let alone my hips or stomach. Stephen, ever so tactfully, commented, “It’s just cause you’re bloated.” I’ve been bloated for three years, then.
I didn’t rue the weight gain, instead declaring matter-of-factly that clothing is transient. It served me a purpose then, when I rapidly dropped 25 pounds from teeth-chattering adrenaline, and it’s now serving a purpose for someone else. I can either get sentimental about the polka dot mini dress cut to labia length that I shouldn’t have ever worn out in public as someone of my height, or I can say, “that was me then, this is me now.” (Surprisingly, in the gracious and humble passing of the torch of all my wardrobe’s best hits, the sequined shorts from Buffalo Exchange still pleasantly zip closed up my backside. Like the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, they live to fight another day, much to Stephen’s dismay.)
The Box™ is the embodiment of everything I once held sacred, held space for. I was holding space for the orange sandblasted glasses with the gold rims because the two of us drank mimosas out of them for precisely one (1) Christmas morning, which we hoped to make tradition. I was holding space for the empty jars without lids because as a woman, everything that once came in its own container must be transferred into a different, kitschier container. I was holding space for the bike helmet because I thought, maybe one day I’d like to hop back on a road bike and snake my way up to the parkway like we used to, before the accident.
Despite the pending curb alert growing by the day, I actually did keep a lot, orderly packed away and stacked almost ceiling high a full month and a half before we have to be out of our current place. Less the essential items we’re still using, I have nothing left to do until move-in date except fantasize about loading and unloading our dishwasher, showering in my own bathroom, washing my pilates clothes the night-of instead of Lysoling the stink out of them.
When I tell you, I’ve never counted the luxury of time as a blessing so fucking hard. Four years ago, having been deprived the opportunity – no, the free will – to choose where we were going to live and the means by which we’d get there, I’m now giving myself carte blanche to goon over the sorting of it all into literal and figurative piles, so to speak: who gets to the front of the line (the cast iron pans), who gets tossed (the holey cork yoga mat), who gets put in The Box™ (the $25 giftcard to a restaurant in Conshohocken I’m literally never going to visit).
To be yanked from your cozy third floor walk-up, charming only in rose-colored retrospection, due to circumstances beyond your control, taints the current first-floor place and its clanky metal ramp the hue of something muddied and bile green in my head: that is, it was a means to an end, a necessary but still painful adjustment to a new life we never asked for, one we spent the entire first six months or so binge-watching all 93 episodes of Lucifer.
Then, various men in my life – those I’ve known intimately and those I’ve hardly spoken to – tromped through our bedroom and stripped our King bed of its sheets and pillowcases, hesitantly grappled with the lid on my antique crystal bowl full of “wedding jewelry” (mercifully, the vibrator I kept nearby had been tossed weeks prior), picked clean my musty clothes – all pit-stained and stale – from the 6-foot closet rod we had hand-screwed into the wall. They did all the heavy lifting, which I appreciated (lord knows I couldn’t lift a finger except to check behind the toilet, the windowsills, the back corner of the closet we never used, as if I would have left something there), but they pulled the clothes hangers two grimy fistfuls at a time, descending and ascending our stairs like a well-oiled machine, and hung them in the moving trailer positively ass backwards. My previous combination ROYGBIV/warm to cool seasonal gradient of clothing organization was now a ruined mess, my vintage red blazer unceremoniously draped over our coffee machine.
They were witness to the sticky mouse traps covered in droppings all over our kitchen counters; counters we hadn’t prepared food on or wiped down as a couple since pre-March 13th of that year.
They packed Stephen’s steel-toed Doc Martens and jeans with the metal buttons on the back pockets, his blood-stained backpack with the bike’s U-lock still inside, nestled in his mildewed work clothes from that night, which still felt damp with phantom sweat if you felt them long enough. They packed everything as if he was just going to pick up where he left off and use them all tomorrow, because they didn’t know better yet. I didn’t either.
I dissociated watching some mindless cooking competition on the Food Network while my mom and stepdad wrapped my dishes in newspaper behind me, her urging me to tackle the heaping pile of junk mail and bills festering on our end table, more coffee ring than wood at that point.
But it’s Summer 2025 now, and I’m procuring packing tape and bubble wrap of my own volition. I’m securing the bottoms and corners of boxes. I’m buttressing crystal wine glasses and pie dishes and only the mugs actually worth keeping. I’m delicately staggering my Winter clothes by the hanger in all four corners of a Home Depot box, blazers in tact. I’m conferring with Stephen through each phase of the process: when was the last time you touched or looked at this, do you think we’d have use for this, there’s no way we can get rid of this, when we get to the new place we should put this here, we should replace this. Let’s. Together.
I’m packing. I’m purging. I’m controlling the narrative.
Yesterday I had trauma therapy and it was the second consecutive session I cut short by a half hour. I am simply running out of things to talk about. I told her that I was shamelessly reading my old travel writing from our two-week stint backpacking through Southern Italy. I saw a photo of Stephen standing at the foothills of the mountains in the Amalfi Coast, looking out at the sea. I felt neither nostalgic nor numb. I felt, oddly, content.
That was him then, this is him now.
Tomorrow, I think I’ll put the “FREE” box out on the curb once and for all. Shedding what I can no longer hold space for.
In truth, it is a fantastic box.
© 2025 Andrea Festa
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