The Move

Finally, Mother's frail health obligated the move to a ground floor unit. Years waiting for an apartment, same complex, opposite side. Six days wading through thirty years of memories, what to discard, what to embalm in fresh packing, what to conceal. The sixth day I walked through the room that had long ago been mine, summoning the brazen dead: the beautiful bouts with suicide, the sleeping girl once loved, the reams of words and miles of drawings---enough to plaster across each forsaken history. Closets bared like a soul denuded by war, the ugliness scoured from view. Nothing left to do but to unplug memory, shut down thought, and call up the manager to give it a once-over.