I’m supposed to be packing. I’m headed up to NY again (yes, I know gas is expensive) to spend a few days and the 4th with some friends. I have a job interview while I am up there, but I don’t know that I want to return to Buffalo for good.

I walk around this apartment; the place I’ve tried so hard to make our home for the last few months.

I think about what is “mine”. What I can leave with, what I have to leave behind. Am I prepared to start over with very little? To have to finnagle a way to find some of the basics, because it’s easier for me to get them than to have him need things? I find myself taking things into the spare room, making piles of necessities. Making two separate spaces, one for things that can go now, one for things that can’t until I find a permanent place.

So much of this place is “ours”. So many things I can’t take, because he needs them, and I know I can find a way to live without. The fact that I want to leave him as comfortable as possible doesn’t escape my notice. I know my guilt about this separation is leeching into the ability to pack belongings.

Some part of me feels I don’t deserve the things that might make me feel at home somewhere else.