Love notes make great epitaphs/ when excerpted, we could fill boxes/ labeled lifetimes with misplaced nametags.

I have now, after almost a month, almost fully moved in to Studio 5, Room 307.

My clothes are in drawers, my books are on shelves, my tv and dvd player are hooked up, and I have three different ways to fill the room with music. (Five, I suppose, if you count the dvd player and the PS2.) My fans are strategically placed. I have groceries. Empty boxes worth saving are stashed under the bed. My Dylan blanket is spread across the couch, as it should be. And the monkey has found a place to hang.

Of course, there are still broken down boxes waiting in the middle of the kitchen floor to be taken outside to the dumpster. Dirty clothes--in two piles, one in my closet, one in the bathroom--wait for me to buy a hamper. Most of my shoes still remain in the white plastic trash bags in which I brought them out here. The ironing board is still in the plastic it came in, and the majority of the pots and pans are still in their original bubble wrap. I still need to buy a lamp.

Framed and unframed pictures and posters still lean against the walls, waiting to be arranged more permanently. Those are, in fact, the same framed and unframed pictures and posters that spent fourteen months in Chicago leaning against the walls of that apartment. I didn't hang them up when I moved in. And the weeks and months passed. And eventually it seemed silly to hang them up when I would be taking them down again fairly soon.

In that apartment--the one in Chicago--I still had boxes left to be unpacked when I was moving out after over a year. I just brought them to my car and moved them to the next place.

Well, one of the next places. The lease on the place in Old Town was up on June 30th, and I wasn't supposed to be here in California until August 22nd. So I had nowhere to live. I spent a week or so with a friend in the city, living out of a suitcase. Then I went to Europe with that friend for almost three weeks, living out of a suitcase. Then, upon returning to Chicago, I lived (out of a suitcase) on my mom's living room couch in the suburbs for about four weeks.

Living on that couch was a peculiar experience. It was the same couch I'd napped on most days after getting home from middle school and high school. That was in what my family now refers to as 'the old house.' The house I lived in from age two until my sophomore year of college.

Making the nostalgia ring more loudly during my nights in my mom's new living room was the work I was supposed to be doing. Her house was filled with boxes of my things. Boxes from Old Town. Boxes still packed from Brown two years earlier. Boxes that had been in a storage unit for years.

Those were the worst. Boxes of things from infancy onward. My baby book and the report on corn I wrote in the third grade and the fabricated family tree my dad provided me in the sixth grade and the Bulls championship game from 1996 on VHS and all my graded work from high school. I threw much of it out. That was the endgame of the project. Downsizing. There just isn't room for it all anymore.

Everything I didn't want (or couldn't bring) with me out here had to stay in boxes at my mom's place.

My mom's place is her third since moving out of 'the old house' at the end of 2001. They've gotten progressively smaller. My sophomore year at Brown, I went home for Thanksgiving to a home I'd never seen before. It was a two-story condo in Buffalo Grove. It had a master bedroom and smaller bedrooms for me and my sister. I lived there on school breaks that year and during the following summer. Then she moved to a two-bedroom in Lincolnshire. My sister took the second bedroom. I never lived there.

I don't remember when during my junior year she moved to that second place, so I can't recall where I lived on school breaks that year, but I know I spent the summer before senior year at my dad's place.

My dad's place was his second since moving out of 'the old house' in December of my senior year of high school. (The first was a small, one-bedroom apartment whose temporary nature, after a year or so, haunted him as an apparition of permanence. He had to move. So he found a new place.) It was a two-story condo in Deerfield -- two bedrooms, one of which became mine. I lived there during breaks my senior year as well.

And the summer after my senior year, and for eight months after that, I continued to live at my dad's place. (Somewhere in that time--I believe, though I can't really remember--my mom moved to her current place in Wheeling. Still two bedrooms. One still my sister's.)

At the end of eleven months, I packed up that which wasn't still packed (Over school breaks and summers for the previous couple of years, I'd essentially lived out of my suitcase and a laundry basket. I never brought home much beyond clothes, some books, my computer, cds, and video games. And living with my dad for those months after college, I guess I just didn't get out of the habit.) and moved to the place in Old Town.

My sister moved out of my mom's place sometime after that, leaving my mom with a new den, nee second bedroom.

Somewhere in there then my dad moved to his current place, a block away in a two-story condo that is almost entirely identical to the previous one -- but with a larger master bedroom and the second bedroom set up as his office.

And sometime in there (rather immediately, I think), I enjoyed the city, enjoyed Old Town, enjoyed the place there. But, in small part because I was living well beyond my means, it never ceased to feel like a hotel.

And fourteen months and a trip to Europe later, and I was living on my mom's living room couch -- because the couch in the den was less comfortable (it's the one I used to read on in our 'library' in 'the old house'). And besides, my boxes filled the room.

There are far fewer of those boxes now. Somewhere among them, stashed in the closet of my mom's new den, are two rather small ones marked 'memorabilia' and a couple of shoeboxes marked 'pictures.' Among my many books and old trading cards and warmest clothes, they wait.

And now I'm in California. Almost moved in. With my framed and unframed pictures and posters leaning against the walls.

Wondering where I'll go to when I go home for school breaks.