As the days ticked away to the movers arrival, Christian and I began waging an all out war upon each other. Tears led to screaming and insults which led in turn to more tears. Eyes were rolled, sarcasm was wielded as effectively as any real or imaginary Weapon of Mass Destruction could ever hope to be. By the time we’d finished plucking through the black holes we call closets–which we’d once bragged about as a spectacular feature for a Chinese apartment–I had begun plotting Nico’s and my escape from this entire moving experiment wherein we would stow away on a barge headed for either America or Pakistan depending on my mood.
Before I’d finished finalizing the details of my flight, August 1st, the dreaded packing date had arrived. The movers were horrifyingly on time, Christian and I were both unfortunately hung over, and the apartment was already a complete wreck. Having never partaken of nor witnessed an assisted move before, neither Christian nor I really had much idea of what the whole thing entailed. We walked threw the house, army of uniformed movers in-tow, and pointed at what we wanted shipped. Then before the command had even made it through the translating chain, poof, it was wrapped, taped, and hidden away in a box that was then assigned a number, a label, and the owner, “Mr. Christian.”
Soon enough, the movers were on auto-pilot like some kind of blue-jump-suited, multi-armed Rube Goldberg Machine, leaving Christian and I with a surprising amount of leisure time and far too little coffee–thanks to the packing of our espresso machine–to properly enjoy it. We took turns walking the dog, playing on the internet, and blaming each other for items that mistakenly were or weren’t packed while the moving machine toiled away. What we didn’t do, however, was kill each other. The movers, whether their blessed swift indiscrimination took the thinking and the arguments out of our hands. No longer was moving a matter of forethought and planning and trying to get rid of one another’s possessions. Moving, rather, had been reduced to its purest essence: pointing and taking naps.
In the end, a few things got packed that shouldn’t have, virtually Nico’s entire wardrobe for one, one of the landlord’s couch cushions for another. A few things didn’t get packed than should have–Nico’s winter coat–but for the most part, everything magically ended up where it ought, and by 2 pm Monday all of our possessions (all 103 boxes) had been loaded into our container in preparation for their two month voyage to our new home, leaving us with an apartment filled with echoes and a marriage still intact.