The idea that moving house is one of life's most traumatic experiences is one of those truisms with which I've never had much truck. I imagined the experience could only be traumatic if you had sold one house and had several articulated lorries full of antique furniture, driving up and down outside your new house, which suddenly appeared to have a galloping case of dry rot and a sitting tenant. A simple move like mine - out of a flat at the end of my lease into a house which I owned and to which I had the keys - would, I presumed, be a fairly benign process. But two days after the move, as I sat on a banana box full of crockery and cried for 40 minutes because I couldn't find a pair of socks, I realised how wrong I was.
I had done very little about the move in the weeks running up to D-day, in part because I was still spending all my free time painting, cleaning and generally molly-coddling the new house, and in part because it's exactly the kind of task which brings out the master procrastinator in me. As I always do with tidying my bedroom or de-frosting the fridge, I decided to play chicken with packing, seeing just how long I could get away with not doing it before events overtook me. I reasoned that packing for the move would be a little like packing for a holiday, which only takes up as much time as you give it.
This was a crucial mistake; one that was nearly the undoing of me. It wasn't that the task was much larger than I expected, although it certainly was an eye-opener - all this time, I've obviously been living in the Tardis with an unfeasibly large amount of stuff and I never even realised. No, my big mistake was assuming that packing was a matter of organisation and logistics when in fact, it's an occasion as emotional and sentimental as your best friend's wedding or the anniversary of a relationship that finished two months before. When you start to look at your possessions, they cease to be mere things and become personal signposts of the most evocative kind.
The most obvious culprits are letters, photos and the bits and pieces of personal memorabilia, of which you accumulate a lot in your school and college years, when no day is complete without a confetti of what you considered to be screamingly witty notes and souvenirs of momentous occasions, such as the menu from the cafe where X first said "Hi". Nothing makes time disappear and memories reappear like looking at old letters, so with the detritus of several years still on my bedroom floor, I decided to give up on sorting through the souvenirs and just shovel them into shoeboxes, to be opened when I feel like inflicting my childhood on my grandchildren.
But of course, the memories didn't stop when the photos were put away, but rather got worse from there on in. Most of the objects in the flat were being put under the most rigorous scrutiny to see whether they could in fact be thrown out or given away, as I didn't want to start life in my new house with three boxes of Christmas decorations, a broken laundry basket and several boiled wool jumpers I can't fit an arm into. Unfortunately, sharing some evocative part of your life with an object, tends to give it a life of its own. Faded T-shirts are not just items of clothing, they're stuffed filing cabinets of memories - as I went to throw them out, I would remember the second-hand shops in Quito or New York or Temple Bar in which I'd gleefully found them, the parties I'd worn them to and the boys who had complimented them.
As I started to chuck a hideously stained table cloth, lurking in the back of a cupboard known as the Black Hole, I suddenly remembered both the dinner party which caused the stain and the market where I bought the cloth. Cracked plates, old perfume bottles, worn linen were like letters from the past. For practical reasons, and because nostalgia is too rich a dish to eat very much of, most of the T-shirts, tablecloths, decorations and chipped mugs went in the bin anyway, but the whole process was hugely draining. I had been looking forward to a liberating and cathartic spring clean, ridding myself of a lot of useless clutter but instead I got frog-marched down memory lane.
IN a way, it's not hard to work out why I became so immersed in the past while packing. When you're at college, every May means packing up postcards, coats and memories and every September means falling in love with a new flat and re-organising your few boxes of stuff. But I've had four years in this flat, which is a length of time just long enough to gather lots of bits and pieces but not long enough to forget their individual histories. So many of those histories are ones shared with my flatmate, so assessing which objects to keep was horribly complicated by the knowledge that our many brilliant years of living together were finally coming to an end. Impromptu late-night, living-room discos, long rambling chats about computers, aunts and art, and the very occasional mutual sulk were all conjured up by woolly hats and old tapes and split chopping-boards.
The thing about the packing was that it reminded me as nothing else could, that a very particular and special phase of my life was over. I found 37 pages of painstaking notes made for the very first, very short article I ever wrote, as well as the faltering letters to editors inquiring about work, and realised that I had first started my working life in this flat. My cupboards bore witness to the changeover from buying nothing but thrift store clothes, the odder the better, as a student, to the weaving together of sale purchases from Brown Thomas, the odd piece of vintage and high street favourites that makes up my current wardrobe. Rambling and idealistic letters from friends I'd met on the traveller trail and postmarked India, Africa, Australia, gave way to postcards from new friends on two-week holidays in France, Bali, Mayo.
This was the flat where I got my first job, my first serious boyfriend, my first bit of disposable income and my first real sense of belonging to civic life - I voted, I paid bills, I knew people about town, I criticised the government, I paid taxes. Above all, I changed over those four years, so the letters, lists, posters, and books that belonged to my younger self seem outdated as artefacts, but accurate and poignant markers of a passage of time. Rites of passage are muddier things than they used to be, because people grow up in a more organic fashion than the days when you moved out of home to get married. You move out of home because your friend has a spare room in a flat. You move somewhere else because the rent goes up. You buy a house because it makes more sense to pay a mortgage. In the rush to move on and grow up, you forget to take stock and examine just how far you've travelled.
As the bags of rubbish and the packing cases started to pile up, I became increasingly saturated with the past and aware of its sometimes uneasy, sometimes congenial relationship with my present. I thought about starting the whole process again in the new house, a place which is all about the future and the giddy amalgam of encounters, conversations and crises yet to take place. So when I finally gave way to tears, it wasn't really because the black plastic sacks were yielding up several different sizes of wooden spoons but no socks, it was because I finally realised that, despite the excitement of a new house, the smell of fresh paint and the shivery excitement of things to come, I had just left more behind than a few curling film posters and an empty flat.
Louise East can be contacted at wingit@irish-times.ie