It’s a tiny piece of paper; a scrap from a time of Texas bills, transmogrified into packing material two years ago. A slip that snuck, across state lines, a tiny cling; now resting on the floor of my car.

I’ve moved too much, and in the last one, ended up apart from my things, in a pretty senseless act of nonanticipation. The girl who moved to D.C. to become a something became the girl who was severance-packaged two months later; who sent her things to Phoenix to store while she sorted things out, but ended back in Atlanta, where the damn things, the stuffs, had been just months prior.

Dreading a repeat of that intensely illogical and expensive chain of events, I’ve held off on fetching them. What if, again, I need to buy a plane ticket and see the world? What if, again, the job isn’t real and the rest disappears, and I’m stuck, again, with no choice but to send the things back to the desert?

And so the days seem emptier than they should.

Nights, insubstantial.