The Last Pile
The final day of packing up, the day where you walk out the door for very last time and say your teary goodbyes to the concrete and glass box that has been home for the past decade, involves a process of ever-diminishing piles of crap.
I recently talked about the penultimate day of packing up the house and all the fun I had sampling alcohol, medicines and diverse cleaning fluids. That was about the high point of last week (pun intended). The final day of packing up, the day where you walk out the door for the very last time and say your teary goodbyes to the concrete and glass box that has been home for the past decade, involves a process of ever-diminishing piles of crap.
By this point, the really juicy stuff is long gone - whisked away to its new home in a removal lorry. The sofa, the beds, the big-screen TV, the boxes of personal stuff, the general clutter of the last month - all in the past. The house is empty now - echoey and sad, devoid of the life that it once contained. The art is stripped from the walls, the rooms are featureless, the cupboards bare. The good-natured chaos of 200 cardboard boxes had filled the house with a different kind of energy for a while - a nostalgic but hopeful serenade of beer from tin cans and impromptu dinners with neighbours who came over to help lug 20kg olympic discs out to the umpteenth van - but even that is long gone now. Those 'good times' somehow seem like a distant memory when you're faced with the stark nakedness of white walls and bathrooms you use by accident and then have to shout out for toilet paper.
This house is a blank canvas again, but I won't be the one painting this time. It's odd really - a blank canvas is normally something you start, not finish, with - but packing up a life is a few-in-a-lifetime opportunity to deconstruct, to break back down to its core ingredients a dish that you've spent a long time cooking. We don't do that too often if you think about it - we're used to creating, not creatively destroying.
Deconstructing the material aspects of your life can be quite informative. For example, I have 5 meticulously sorted boxes of cables (audio/video, computer, network, music, power), yet my entire collection of toiletries fits into a single wash bag. What does this say about me? Do I want to be known for my commendable collection of USB adaptors but dubious personal hygiene? My general feeling is that the majority of the articles we surround ourselves with say more about our past then our present or future: clothes that haven't been worn for years, books that have never been read, 17 spare dishcloths when only two are on permanent rotation. Honestly, I could have tipped 90% of it in a black hole and not even noticed. Anyway, I've done that rant before - no need to repeat myself.
The last day unfolds like this: you start with a couple of neatly arranged piles in various strategic points around the house: last minute cleaning implements, last night's makeshift bedding, rubbish, random articles. You play these piles like a game of chequers - they move, eat each other, spawn new piles, combine and morph, until, eventually, you're faced with 'the last pile'. The significance of 'the last pile' cannot be overstated: in the gameshow of junk, these contestants are the valiant ones that made the last round, the grand finale. They survived every attempt at disposal, donation, packing away and even consumption. This, reader, is the shit that is going to accompany you personally, in your own car, on the final leg of your journey.
My final pile consisted of an heirloom gold watch left to me by my great-great-grandfather, a first edition of 'Around the World in 80 Days', signed by Jules Verne himself and a…
No.
Of course it didn't.
My final pile consisted of huge amounts of toilet paper that just seemed to seep out of the walls, a full-to-the-brim tin of weed (hand selected from the carrier bags full I was too scared to take on the journey), a jar of long-expired pickled chili peppers, a little person-shaped salt shaker (pepper shaker's whereabouts unknown), two mismatched wine glasses (one white, one red) and two mystery packets of strawberry liquorice found in the high cupboard above the fridge that have presumably been there since we moved in.
And then there was literally nothing except total and utter emptiness. We took one last walk around, closed the door and left, along with our last pile stashed unceremoniously in a blue rubbish bag. The wine glassed clinked incessantly through the three-and-a-half hour journey north and I'm pretty sure they both smashed when I transferred the bag out of the car and placed it on top of its fallen comrades in the behemoth of a shitpile that was waiting for it at its destination. I haven't had the heart to check.
Yesterday I realised that I'd left a remote control velcro'd to a pillar in the gym (a setup that allowed me to change channel whilst on the exercise bike), which of course means that the venerable last pile wasn't the last pile at all. The last (abandoned, dispersed) pile, at least as far as I'm currently aware, consists of said remote control and a bag of fitments for a freezer we sold to our neighbour. I'm sure there will be more. I suspect that houses are like toothpaste tubes in that respect. You squeeze as hard as you can for weeks on end but there will always, always be a little bit of you left in there.