What you can live without
Dear friends —
It’s amazing what you can live without. I rediscovered this in the last month as I got rid of almost everything I owned to become a semi-nomad. Whittle things down to the essentials, and you find out your life doesn’t take up much room at all.
Try it yourself. Over the next 24 hours, note everything you use. Chances are, each day you use the same simple two dozen or so things over and over again, and most other things rarely at all.
This is especially true if you’re following safer at home mandates. A few comfy outfits, a handful of toiletries, maybe a little makeup in case you want to pretty up before venturing outside for a walk or have an exciting Zoom meeting planned. Purse and wallet. A few plates and bowls and utensils. A phone, laptop, an ereader, a journal to write in. Some pens. Headphones.
I really don’t need much else.
Has this quarantine made you discover things you own that you really don’t use — and perhaps, at this point, don’t even want to use? As I cleared my Burbank apartment, I found so many objects I hadn’t bothered with in years: a travel French press (I’m not even a fan of camping), tennis racquet (used for less than a year, years ago), fancy dresses and shoes (great for all those amazing Oscar parties I’m never invited to), hair accessories (I just don’t care enough about my hair to spend lots of time on it), a Brita and ice cube trays (my fridge had an ice maker and water filter), an extra iPhone.
Getting rid of everything was cathartic. To a woman my size in my fashion swap group, I gave about two-thirds of my closet. She’ll keep what she likes and fits her, then take the rest to the next swap event. A book club friend had a friend who’d started a secondhand bookstore; he arrived in a van and relieved me of all my books in one fell swoop! I sold my unused Chromebook to a woman desperate to entertain her quarantined kids; she came over double-masked, with plastic gloves on. I even got rid of my rice cooker — and discovered it’s actually pretty easy to just cook rice in a pot. Then I gave away the pot to a Facebook friend.
When I was done, despite the fact that I kept extras like my humidifier, foam roller, and 15 pairs of shoes, all my belongings could be stacked in a little pile in the corner of the room. Looking at it felt freeing — I’m no longer weighed down! I can go anywhere at any time!
It was also disorienting — Is this really all my life comes down to?
On Sunday morning I packed that pile into my little car and started driving to Tucson. Departures are often anticlimactic. There are some nervous jitters and a cleansing sense of erasing the past and getting to start anew, but there isn’t the drama of the movies — no crescendoing exit music, no closeups of emotion-laden faces, though I suppose you could arrange for such things. Usually, when I leave a place, I experience mostly a low-grade anxiety over practical matters: Did I forget anything? Is Waze working properly? Should I let the Airbnb owner know my ETA?
But everything went smoothly. I’d considered buying Depends for the drive so I wouldn’t have to use any germy toilets, but in the end I made one masked stop at Blythe, California, just west of the Arizona state border, to get gas and use the bathroom at a Burger King, where I also got a Whopper meal, my first since high school. The weather was dry, in the high nineties, the landscape had long since turned to desert — cacti, palm trees, dust.
A few hours later I arrived at my destination. For the first time in my adult life, I’m living in a standalone house — a two-bedroom with a front and back yard and even an enclosed, cool back porch area I’ve decided to call “my chill space.” There’s a Whole Foods in walking distance. The place is fully furnished, equipped with a dishwasher and wifi and central air — and costs half of what I used to pay for rent for my one-bedroom in Burbank.
They say wherever you go, there you are — which is to say that despite downsizing my belongings and changing states, I can’t say my life really has changed a whole lot, to a large part due to the quarantine. I wake up at the same time, have the same job, chat with the same friends. I’m still working on my same novel in the mornings, making my way through The Leftovers and Emmanuel Carrere’s latest book of essays in the evenings. The biggest change has been my walks — which are now relegated to very early or very late in the day — and sometimes replaced by indoor workouts — due to the heat. Coronavirus cases are rising sharply in Arizona, so it’ll be a while before I venture out to public places — though I hope I’ll be able to do some of that before I leave in August.
What have you discovered you can live without this year? What have you freed yourself of?
Let me know what’s on your mind —
Love,
Siel
P.S. Three links you might enjoy:
Just Mercy is free to watch on YouTube
The New Yorker has a new short story by Haruki Murakami
Portraits of single moms by choice
P.P.S. The best book I read last month was Amina Cain’s Indelicacy. I also finished War and Peace with #TolstoyTogether!