moving, of course, always one of the most loneliest of endeavors.

waking up early, like 5:30 am ("___ rawly waking, crude sunlight on her lemon streets") always the sensation of being other while you are here, a city that is yours only, a selfish, shared solitude.

maybe moving is so lonely because it is the sum total parts of your being stripped to their essence; you and a multitude of boxes, always a few more than you had expected, fitting neatly into a van, truck, some sort of vehicle. is this really who you are? I am boxes of books, boxes of sentimental (surprise, surprise) ephemera from since I was back in this country (age 14?), I am a few boxes of knick-knacks, a lot of clothes, a lot of electronics, supplies for future and projects, unrealized. I am box pile, measurable in cubic feet.

it's not the paucity of scale but the easily-understood nature, and also the extent to which I slowly grow to understand that I am the accumulation of my past selves; so much history layered (and everyone currently alive) - geological strata of selves laid on top of each other like a gorgeous piece of marble or an italian cold-cut sandwich, cut sectionally, scanned on a scanner, layer upon layer of things that are similar and different

or maybe moving is so lonely because it represents some desire of exit, withdrawal, non-contingency from the world - as if that were ever possible or ever even truly conceivable - to even ask the question betrays my imbrication in it. I don't mean 'exit' in some sort of post-structuralist 'living with new foundations' or even 'living without any foundations whatosever', but rather 'exit' in terms of "living with a single suitcase", to be afloat, afree, unbound.

but of course I immediately know that to do so is actually to rely on the worldwide logic of the credit card processor, visa/mastercard accepted here, even in this corner of the world, or the institutional solidity of cash, legal tender for all debts, public or private. the dream of baggage-less freedom thus the more reliant on the dream of a free-flowing network like money - not material contingencies and specificities, but the immediate fungibility that money insists upon; your dollar is my dollar. this card swipe works for this hotel room, no matter where. with just a shirt on my back, materially lightweight, I mobilize global infrastructures, my phone hopelessly entangled with api endpoints and cell tower / fiber optic infrastructure and gps satellites.

some time ago I read what I had written a year ago (summer, sunlight, sunsets over water gliding into the side of your eyes) about the world: something about how major problems ultimately arise from material issues, and eventually need to be solved at that level. I like the formulation, whether I agree with it or not. is it not just made out of the material? is everything not inevitably contingent? the world resists abstraction, occasionally pierces through your layers of encapsulation like a sea urchin in nested plastic bags. you're in pain because your hip hurts because you slipped on that piece of ice because that area of sidewalk was poured improperly and creates a pool of rainwater.

in any case. so: moving.

moving perhaps is then lonely because it's about seeing your worldly positions in a point of view of movement, weight, volume, dimensions. even the usual metric of valuation through cost/money (however flawed it may be) goes out the window. "I have so much stuff", I cry, "and I want none of it any more", while simultaneously understanding that to have stuff is to be bound and to not have stuff is to be bound even more. and 'bound' is the completely wrong word, as if there is any sort of freedom - maybe it's 'entangled', in the way that strings and fishing nets are always connected, so that even though the degree of 'connection' is never called into question, different levels of entanglement are eminently possible. are you knotted, twisted, slip-knotted, gordianed?

I have so much stuff and I want none of it, and I am so much part of the world and I don't want to be tangled, but here I am, a human being because I am a body.