In between packing boxes and finding childcare and new local doctors and establishing a local bank account and wrapping up matters here and hiring my replacement at Tulane and running news searches to familiarize myself with the faculty and projects at UNC, well, in between all of that plus painting and cleaning and emptying sheds and attics, there are moments plagued by the Empty Closet Syndrome. It is one thing to suffer the Syndrome yourself, it is another to suffer it for three.

The syndrome might be better were the closets fully empty, but they are not. Their contents have been decreased by about 90%, leaving only the items that I either don’t have the right box for or don’t know what to do with. And the Empty Closet Syndrome might be believed to be the result of an actually empty closet, but researchers ought have named it the Emptying Closet Syndrome, for the process of emptying is the underlying cause. Who knows how much the syndrome progresses once the closet is actually empty?

I, for one, have never moved across the country so deliberately. Any move prior to this one has involved a U-Haul hastily packed by a few friends re-payed with sushi, or the move involved even less than that, say, a car called the Potato who drove around North America for a year before settling on a destination. Or, the move involved my mother and I packing a borrowed van to drive me to college. Sure enough, none of these moves involved packing me and my daughters so that strangers can come into the house in a mere two weeks and pick up those boxes, put them in an 18-wheeler, and leave me standing with my two girls in an empty house until we get into our own car and drive across the country to meet our boxes on the other end of their trip, maybe even giving us time to stand in a new empty house, waiting. The Empty Closet Syndrome involves the moment the truck is gone and the only items left in the house are the few I never figured out how to pack or get rid of. Which must translate into: Didn’t Want.

When one empties the closets to pack boxes, one inventories her life. Why, for instance, am I continuing to save the charred pages that remain of my treasured Great Gatsby? Why is ”the book” sitting alone on an empty bookcase, evidence I have yet to figure out how to pack it? Surely the move will turn the pages to dust. What to do with my mother’s few dresses that I would never wear, but don’t want to part with? What’s my obsession with giving my daughters finger puppets? And other people’s too?

Each time a linen closet or kitchen cabinet is fully emptied, I look into the space and recall that I haven’t seen such a space since I moved in, and what a difference there has been in my life, and in the lives of my children, since then. This, I guess, is ultimately the Empty Closet Syndrome. When one faces the emtpy closet and the closet looks back.

The closet says, “So long now, Katie. And good luck.”

The closet says, “What did you think I was? I’m just an old closet. You still have your things and you will meet them on the other end. Now, go on. Get out of here.”

The closet says, “You knew you wouldn’t live here forever.”

The closet says, “People leave me all the time. I’m used to this. Why are you still standing there?” 

The closet doesn’t have much heart, does it?

I tell the bedroom closet I knew I wouldn’t live here forever, that he didn’t get enough light that I could find my shoes, that he didn’t have enough space for two. I tell the linen closet that, once, I accidentally put a book of Blake’s poetry in a stack of towels. That was during a hard time, I tell the closet, a few months after the storm, when the only thing I could control was the cleanliness of the sunroom floor and the organization of the linen closet. It is funny how, looking back at times of disaster in my life, I see myself organizing and mopping, or other people organizing and mopping, how once, right before we broke up, I caught X.Q. organizing and labeling the containers in a kitchen cabinet. X.Q. labeling! For real!

I remind the closet of a house I saw shortly after the storm, and how the exterior wall had been ripped off by the wind. All that remained looked like a set: a living room intact, the son’s bedroom upstairs with the bed still made and his towel hanging on a hook on the back of the door. Even the remote control was in the middle of the bed. The storm didn’t destroy as much as it exposed.

The closet says, “What are you telling me that for?”

I shake my head. I am not sure, Closet, why I am telling you that. You, closet, seem to understand what comes and goes. It’s the rest of us who are still toting our treasured objects in boxes to the next house.

I close the closet’s door. Stand with my back to the door.

Look, there’s another room that still needs to be packed. That’s only mostly empty.

This little house has had its share of good times and its share of scars. I carry the good times with me and tell those stories over and over, to elicit young laughter. I carry the scars too, keep them closer to heart, or perhaps only in my poetry and fiction, or else I tell them to no one. The wall has been repainted. A hole has been repaired. These are just walls that hold stories that for six years I lived.

When someone arrived recently to carry away my younger daughter’s old Radio Flyer trike — she has a big girl’s bike now — the girls stood at the front door. They said in unison, “Goodbye, little bike.”

(It’s true: They talk to bikes like I talk to closets.)

Then, when the door was closed and their backs were to it, Sophie said, “The bike is gone. But it will always be in our hearts. Right, Mom?”

Morning with temperatures in the teens and a drive toward the lake. Pelicans on the bayou. A few bent trees. Stark trees with branches like skinny arms with hands in the air, fingers spread out. We’ll drop off paperwork at K.C.’s office before getting on the highway. Today we are driving to Atlanta for J.C.’s funeral. We’re listening to “Morning Edition”; there’s talk of the U.S. citizenship test and facts that even we citizens don’t know.

The three of us haven’t been in the car together since we evacuated. I haven’t been to Atlanta since I drove through on my first drive out the city after the storm; I was on my way to school. “You moved here for a good job,” said the billboard. “Now find one!” I took notes for a poem I’ve yet to be able to write — those shockingly put-together buildings, shiny and neon and full of nightlights, looking so sure of themselves. In the middle of a thunderstorm, eighteen-wheelers blasting water on my windshield, and I took the next exit to find the first motel room I could find, then sat at the edge of the bed in the dark, overwhelmed. I called X and tried to explain the feeling. Silence. Then the rain stopped. So I pulled the hood over my head, put my hands in my pockets, and walked across the street to a Chinese restaurant, where I stood at the entrance surprised to find myself the only white person in the place, then surprised to feel surprised and wondered what it meant about who I was and where I’d come from. The little girl whose family was celebrating her birthday eventually fell asleep with her arms folded on the table.

I look sometimes at my poetry journal from that night in Atlanta and think that one day I’ll turn it into something good. Last night I dreamt that American culture never learned loss and that what now separates us–

(us: in the dream, we’ve arrived in a new place after a walk through an enormous empty building like a cathedral or cave – and he says it only looks empty but that’s because I don’t yet see what’s there — if I stand still and listen to our echo, I’ll know something is really there and then we’ll have found it — I wake in the middle of the night and write “walking around to find the music, music in the window” – but still in the dream, we walk to a kitchen, where we sit side by side for coffee served by the stout man in a starched white chef’s coat, and he leans over the counter to pour the milk that I decide not to stir, but will instead wait for the liquid to gradually mix itself — he’s wearing Lennon glasses, heart shaped)

–is that we’ve learned what the rest of the world has always known, where one civilization always gave way or lost way to another. Although that’s also true in the U.S., those stories are still remarkably silent. Won’t always be, of course. A collective conscience that reaches a new level of understanding about loss makes you wonder how it could ever be possible to want anything but marrow. Maybe you even find compassion for the moments when that’s impossible for someone. You’re glad you can’t remember the last time you felt that way.

(Man, this land along the Mississippi Gulf Coast is so brown — and yet even the thinned line of trees is greening in February – and K.C. laughs when we cross the state line and we both look up and read the welcome sign: “Mississippi: It’s like coming home.” Well, that’s the stupidest state motto I’ve heard, she says. Yeah, let’s suppose Mississippi IS home; then crossing the line is not actually COMING home but feeling LIKE you’re coming home, which is not quite the same thing. But you know, driving home from the east, crossing into Mississippi has always felt like something next to home — which is neither home nor like home, but at least next to.)

You remember driving one night on an overpass over the interstate when the interstate was black, no street lights, no taillights, no headlights. You remember that moment when you’re staring at a daylight photograph of that same empty interstate. You hear yourself telling the story of that night, of the small and insignificant poem you wrote about that night: riding through the blackness on the overpass, you cried. Someone said, “Why are you crying again?” And you said, “Because the interstate is empty.”

You are glad, so glad, that someone handed you a photograph that captured that feeling that once disappeared in that black night. You are glad, somehow, that you know thousands of people actually felt that moment too and understand what the hell you’re talking about. You’re thankful for the handful of people you met in your life who taught you to walk through instead of around. You’re thankful that you too cried over an empty interstate. You’re glad for all the people you know who never had to look at an empty interstate but who you know also would have cried when driving over an empty interstate. You’re glad those people keep telling other stories. You like their stories very much.

I thought my next trip to Atlanta would be for AWP; sorry it hasn’t worked out that way.