The nice thing about moving is that, when the day actually arrives, you are too exhausted and crabby to wander pensively through empty rooms or ponder any kind of moving-as-moving-on metaphor.

The night before moving, I realized I could not realistically expect the movers to cope with a floor covered with pine needles and couches covered with cat hair. Unfortunately, when I brought out the vacuum, plugged it in, and started on the living room, it exploded, covering the room with some kind of white powder. Dirt? Pulverized cat litter? I'd rather not think too much about it. Instead of merely packing up my stray bits and pieces and getting some sleep, I was up until about two beating out the rug as best I could and scotch taping the hair off the sofa.

Then, of course, once everything had been stuffed into my new apartment, I had to find a place to put everything. You can only pack in an impressively organized way until two days before the move. Then you find a load of clothes in the dryer. You realize the teakettle is still on the stove. Someone returns an armload of books. I ended up with five or six huge boxes labeled "clothes/bedding/coffee-maker/utensils/various". I would think I had found a place for everything, only to find a sneaky shoebox of art supplies lurking amongst the linens.

All weekend, I had no time to think, no time to worry, no time to mourn or celebrate this last stage of moving on from marriage. So this is my strategy, from here on out: when I start to overanalyze, I will simply move.