I am realizing how late it is in the year finally, the temperatures having finally dropped to the bitter windy cold that normally marks this time of year, the warm early fall temperatures of sixties and fifties fading, November now feeling like November.
I went to IKEA tonight and nearly lost it. I felt weird about being there but needed a narrow bookcase and a small desk for my room and wanted it then, did not want to scavenge countless stores and look at pricey things that weren't the size I needed. It was depressing, the store, reminded me of the one I went to in Northern Virginia, in the suburbs, the one I would go to with my mom after driving on the highway and then parking in a giant mall parking lot. I remembered having to walk through this maze of dioramas of perfect little rooms, so well furnished, and it was all shit, all numbers next to these boring lives that I guess I am aspiring to now, or feeling like I was in that moment, and writing down the aisle and number where I can find this bookshelf, where I can purchase my unhappiness. I wanted to hurry up and get to where I could pick up the furniture but kept on having to walk and walk through the maze of imaginary rooms I was finding myself longing for, and I felt crazy, felt the lure of being an American consumer start to hypnotize me with its song. I needed to get out of there, but I ended up passing tea candles I wanted to buy, 100 for only four dollars or so, and wine glasses and lamps. I had to catch my breath and tell myself to get out of the store, that I didn't want to be a headline in The Onion: Man Has Panic Attack In Ikea; Medics Called to Scene to Subdue An Extreme Case of Consumerism Anxiety. Or something like that. The lights were so bright. I got myself together, calmed down, did not want to be some headline, some crazy person freaking out in IKEA, and I bought my shit, arranged to have it delivered and left.
Tomorrow evening, the packages will be delivered to my new East Village place of residence, what I call the gay boardinghouse, what my coworkers jokingly call, and which I am realize may in some ways be true, a halfway house, them all a bit more bougie than me. And I have some anxiety now because I am working full-time and getting paid really well and have disposable income available to me so that I can make purchases at IKEA and arrange to have them delivered, and I am away that this is short term probably there, that house, six months or so, that I still think I am going to move into my own apartment, but now have more ambitious dreams residence wise, and those, those are counterbalanced with nightmares, worries about the onset of adulthood finally here at 27 for me, a steady job and a place not as far away, and talking about different things and with different people.
And I am trying to hold on to some things, but everything seems up for grabs right now. And I am trimming down my belongings, getting rid of a nice chunk of books, deciding which I actually need, which are worthy of taking up space in a small room, and which are just filler, just things that sit there and which mean nothing to me, texts that I have and probably never will have a relationship with.
You have to decide what to keep and what to get rid of.
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