Picking up the Pieces

"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
~Percy Bysshe Shelley

I didn’t know what to expect for a readjustment period. At times, I look and feel completely re-acclimated to life in New York. But I’m a bit disturbed to say that just under the surface not everything is completely in order.

My apartment is a perfect symbol of that. There are two things going on here. The first is the inability to organize that which I dropped as soon as I walked in the door. The second is an unwillingness to open up vestiges of a previous existence.

I was resident in this apartment all of 36 hours before leaving for Russia last June. Just enough time to not have any sort of routine for living here. When I returned, I unpacked a large backpack and took stock of where I had been. Part of that was to perform a survey, another part was to admire and record the booty. I laid out all my souvenirs on the coffee table and took a picture. Now, almost 2 months later, I notice that some of those things haven’t moved.

Some of the souvenirs have been shifted onto a side table where they remain completely undisturbed. Central to this pile is a stack of tickets and my tourbook and my passport – the things I was almost never without during the entire length of my time abroad. They sit there, awaiting categorization or archiving or for some sort of sense to be brought to them. I fear that’s a task that will take a very long time to complete.

I sense this because other tasks are in a much more active stage and they are taking a very long time to come to closure – no matter how much emphasis I put on them. Take the digital clutter of my thousands of photos, for example. The two month period during which I traveled across Russia is organized into a series of folders and subfolders. I’ve even photo-shopped them and laid them out in a publishable form. But I just can’t get the job done. I desperately want to finish it – to have a book I can share while my trip is still timely, something to share before my friends and family think it’s weird that I can’t stop talking about Russia.

“Look at this; this is where I was, this is what I saw. Do you understand?”

The sole remaining task to complete a 250 page photo book, though, is stumping me. I’ve broken the book into chapters corresponding to each city, with the intention of heading each with a brief summary of my impressions. It can’t be much more than very cursory stuff, really, only a couple of paragraphs at most. But I just can’t get it done. Absolutely nothing has come of all the occasions that I’ve forced myself to sit down and get to work. Nothing.

For that reason, I get a deep sense of foreboding when I stray into the area of the hard drive that houses photos from the other 9 months in Russia.

For as much as I want to get that photo album done, though, I’m completely blasé about accomplishing another important task – unpacking. I have not unpacked anything more than my backpack and one suitcase I shipped from Moscow. About one-quarter of my apartment is dedicated to an immense pile of boxes from my previous dwelling in New York. For some reason, I’m very uninterested by what’s in them.

I’m wearing the same half-dozen t-shirts I’ve been wearing since April. I’m wearing the socks I bought for 11 rubles a pair in June. I’m rotating between the 2 pairs of jeans I’ve had available for the last year. My one indulgence has been to buy a pair of shorts. Still, when I do laundry it all fits into one machine.

Life and the seasons will change a bit, and no doubt I’ll want and need some items from that huge stash. As for now, I neither want nor need the vast majority of those things.

Indeed. I remain stubbornly incurious about what’s in all those boxes.

This will probably all evolve over time. I suppose I’ll begin to gravitate toward getting things done, toward actually assuming a lifestyle that those boxes necessitate – a convergance toward the material possessions I’ve carefully accumulated and carefully stored. I’ll probably get back to the state where I can finish the enormous meals served to me in restaurants.

Right now, though, it all still seems just a little bit out of reach.