People Who Move Do Not Say Goodbye

I have moved house eight times. What I dislike most is hearing someone say, “Congratulations. A new beginning.”

A new beginning sounds like a floor plan sent by an estate agent: a good angle, every defect just outside the frame. The real beginning of a move is when you are kneeling on the floor looking for a box for the rice cooker and discover that you have kept a charging cable broken three years ago.

For my eighth move I hired a cleaner by the hour and asked a friend to help. His name was Arno. His job was to write on the boxes. He divided my things into Books, Clothes, Kitchen, and Unidentified Objects. By afternoon there were five boxes of Unidentified Objects.

“You have no inventory system,” he said.

“I do,” I said. “The inventory refuses to cooperate.”

The fifth box held two mismatched earrings, four expired access cards, a diary with only its first page written, and a sticky note. It had been on the back of the refrigerator for years. In my handwriting: Milk is almost gone.

Arno held it up. “You’re keeping this too?”

“I am.”

“Why?”

“Because I was trying very hard to live then.”

He said that was an expensive reason. I said the paper was free; explanations were expensive.

I wrote the note when I had just arrived in Beijing. I lived in a north-facing shared flat. The refrigerator often contained half a cabbage and a bottle of chilli sauce nobody claimed. After late shifts I bought a carton of milk downstairs, then forgot to drink it the next morning. Eventually I began leaving notes: take out rubbish, pay the internet bill, buy milk, call Mum back.

They looked like discipline. Really, I was afraid of coming apart.

I tucked the note into a cookbook I have never cooked from but have moved four times. Arno advised me to throw it away. I said fine, and put it in the bag marked Consider Throwing Out. When the move was over, I carried that whole bag to the car.

The new flat was two streets from the old one. There was no lift and no advantage to the removal-company minimum charge, so I made seven trips myself. Books first, then pots, then a dying pot of mint. On the sixth trip the landlord called to ask when I would return the key. I was in the stairwell holding a lamp and suddenly could not remember the old flat’s number.

I had lived there for two years and three months.

On the last trip I carried nothing large, only the Consider Throwing Out bag. At the entrance to the new building I set it down and went through it piece by piece. The expired access cards went. The broken cables went. The single earring stayed, because the other one turned up in my pocket. The note stayed too.

The new refrigerator was empty, so clean it looked like a showroom. I went downstairs for milk and bought tape on the way back.

I stuck the note to the side of the refrigerator and wrote four new words beneath it:
Tomorrow you will be hungry.

It was neither a plan nor encouragement. Only a reminder. Wherever people move, they have to leave themselves something to eat first.