Behind the Mic: The Blue Sharpie and the Silence I Am Walking Toward
Because the hardest thing to pack is not the dishes. It is the woman you were in the old house, and the one you are becoming in the new one.
I cried in the middle of Lowe’s over a pack of Sharpies.
Two colors. One for my things, one for hers. I had a system. I always have a system. Label the boxes, keep the chaos contained, stay one step ahead of the feelings. That is how I move through hard things. I organize them.
But I picked up the blue marker, and my chest went tight, because blue is her favorite color. My youngest. The last one to leave.
And just like that I was not standing in a hardware store anymore. I was watching a three-year-old with a blue Airhead and a blue tongue. I was hearing four kids fight over the blue straw, because they each got assigned a color and blue was always the one worth fighting for. I was standing in the middle of twenty years of a loud, full, blue-tinged life, holding a marker, crying in aisle nine.
This move hit different.
I had been counting down to this day for what felt like years. Not with dread exactly. More like the way you brace for a wave you can see coming. I knew a day would come when I would be packing separately from my youngest. I knew it. Knowing did not soften it.
The Body Keeps the Countdown
Here is something I have come to believe in my bones. Your body knows a goodbye is coming long before your mind agrees to call it that.
There is a reason a marker undid me. Our minds do not store everything. They keep what carried feeling. The ordinary Tuesdays blur, but the blue Airhead stays, because love was happening in that moment and the body filed it under keep forever. So when I picked up that Sharpie, I was not being dramatic. I was opening a file my body had been protecting for two decades.
That is not weakness. That is design. We are made to remember the people we love through the smallest, strangest things. A color. A straw. A tongue stained blue.
Grief is just love that got reorganized by a move.
One Box Instead of Ten
Downsizing forces a kind of honesty that I was not ready for.
I stood there with a box of childhood memories knowing I could take one, not ten. And the question was not really do I keep this. The question underneath was, what part of my life still gets to come with me?
Do I keep the fine china from my great-grandmother? The Bama things from my grandfather’s office? I talked it through with Maria, turning each thing over, feeling the strange tug between holding on and letting go. Nobody warns you that decluttering is not about stuff. It is about deciding which versions of yourself you are still willing to carry.
I believe memory boxes hold the truth. I read back through some of mine while I packed, and I realized something I needed to realize. It could not all have been bad. There, in my own handwriting and theirs, were the notes that said I love you, Mom. The proof that the hard story was not the only story.
The Call I Could Not Make
This move hit harder because of a box I did not know what to do with.
I am estranged from my older daughter. So, as I sorted through what to keep and what to release, there was no phone call I could make. I could not ask her; do you want any of these memories. I could not say, I found the thing you made me, should I save it for you. That door is quiet right now.
My younger daughter, in the beautiful, light way of someone who has not yet had to grieve an object, said, Mom, I cannot keep all this stuff. And she is right. She is also young enough not to know yet what the stuff holds.
So, is it stuff? Or is it the memory that helps us remember we were loved?
I packed her box anyway. The older one. I do not know if it will ever be opened by the person it belongs to. But the memory box holds the good and the bad, and I am not ready to pretend the good was never there. Keeping it is my quiet way of leaving the door open.
A New Address, Full of Questions
As I write this, I am sitting in the new place, looking around at rooms that do not know me yet.
And I am wondering what these walls will hold a few years from now. Will my mom ever visit? Will my older daughter ever walk through this door? I do not have those answers. The not-knowing sits in my chest the way the move sat in the dog’s, he paced through every box like he knew the ground was shifting under all of us.
This new address holds more than a different zip code. It holds questions. Hope. Love. A fresh start I am still learning how to trust. I am grieving what I left behind and reaching for what is coming, at the very same time, and I am finally letting both be true instead of forcing one to win.
Why the Silence Is Calling Me
I think this is why the Camino is calling me now.
In a few months I will walk across Spain, and I will be living the truest title I have ever been given. Silent to Spoken. I am going to let the silence hold space for me. After a season this loud, this full of boxes and decisions and goodbyes I did not get to finish, I want to listen to the quiet and hear what it has been trying to tell me underneath all the noise.
Because silence is not empty. Silence has a language all its own. It is where the body finally exhales. It is where you hear the still, small voice you could not make out over the sound of mom being yelled fifty times a day. I spent twenty years being needed out loud. Maybe the becoming happens in the listening.
I am not walking to escape what I am leaving. I am walking to learn how to carry it differently.
Where We Go from Here
If you are standing in the middle of your own boxes, packing up a life that no longer looks the way it used to hear me.
You are allowed to grieve a chapter and be grateful for it in the same breath. You are allowed to keep the box even when you do not know who will open it. You are allowed to need the silence before you find the words. You do not have to have tomorrow figured out to take the next step toward it.
Change is going to come whether we organize it or not. I cannot stop it. But I am learning I can choose how I walk with it. Sometimes right through the middle of the mess, with packing tape stuck to my shirt and a blue Sharpie in my hand, becoming someone new.
Don’t quit in the quiet.
Pause is power. The deeper we dive, the sweeter it gets. Stay sweet out there.
Remember this: moving is hard. It can feel sweet and sour all at once. You can be grateful for the new beginning and still grieve what you are leaving behind. But you are doing better than you know. One box, one breath, one step at a time.
With love,
- Jenn
“The Lord himself goes before you and will be with you; he will never leave you nor forsake you. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged.” Deuteronomy 31:8