Packing up boxes is sad. Always.

The act of putting away memories and moving them to a new place is hard. Leaving behind the things you know in exchange for a fresh start is hard. It’s harder to help pack up boxes, and not get to leave with them.

The beginning of this year is a sad one. I helped my friend pack up her things to move across the country to Washington. I had definitely started to take for granted how nice it was to have a girlfriend living in this place with me. And not just anyone, but someone who I had a pretty long history with.

When I first moved down here everything was new; new people, new job, new places to shop and eat. But what made it a little bit harder was that none of it was new for J. Everywhere we went also had a college memory attached to it. People we saw in stores were people he knew from a class. Every time we drive through the main circle he repeats a college tour to me, “This is the bar I worked at. This is the place we ate at hung over. This place has the best peanut butter milkshakes” and so on. But those places mean nothing to me. They look like worn out college town buildings that need updating. But then last January, I had a friend I knew in college move here. While team JSU was reminiscing about things we’d never seen, we could remember Ovids and hockey games and everything else that made us bleed blue.

It was sad the first time she left me in Lexington, and the second time isn’t showing any promise to be any easier. I know she felt the same way while in the middle of packing boxes and two bottles of wine she suddenly stopped, stood up, and said, “This sucks”.

This. Sucks.

I know what she meant. Packing the boxes doesn’t suck. Picking out what to donate doesn’t suck. Leaving sucks. It was just a truly sucky thing. No matter how exciting it is to be at the next place, or the next level; the leaving sucks.

A, I can’t wait until our paths cross again. Love, S