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An excerpt from Marcelle Manhattan’s lovely piece this week, There’s No Place Like Home:

I move at least once a year.

Since 2003, I’ve subjected myself to six rounds of searches on Craig’s List, six tedious packing rituals, and six tales of mishap with sundry scurrilous moving companies.

You might think me a carefree, irreverent type who treads with a conscience-light, exploratory flounce and lays my whistling head wherever it suits me. But actually, the opposite is true. I’m unsettled seeing my life in boxes. I don’t like spending first nights alone in new bedrooms. In general, I’m risibly bad at goodbyes.

That’s why the most soul-gutting feeling in the world is after the movers have finished, and you’re left standing small and swallowed in an empty apartment, where only months ago you ate and cried and fucked and perhaps fell in love and had your heart broken. But it’s over. So you learn to move on.

In fact, I wonder if I’ve learned too well. Each time I go through a move, I throw away a portion of what I had before-losing some detritus of my life’s misguided homing instincts, like Hansel and Gretel laying crumbs behind them on the way to the Gingerbread Witch. Each time, I shed a piece of my past I no longer care to carry; I’ve gotten the resettling down to a routine, hanging pictures in the same, rehearsed places and hooking up the wires to my electronics like a pro. Which is saying something, since I’m a moron when it comes to technology (don’t ask me why I started a blog).

There’s No Place Like Home, from Marcelle Manhattan.