Pack up all of your clothes. Put the good ones in a suitcase and throw the other half away. It is good, you think, to be able to leave at a moment’s notice, to not take anything you can’t carry. Pick up your bags with your mother’s voice in your head and consider how it will be to carry them up four flights of stairs without someone behind you making sure you don’t die a slow, embarrassing death before you make first month’s rent.

Throw away anything you haven’t touched since you got here and ruthlessly fling it aside, atop shopping bags that have long since fallen over and exploded with your disregard, your tyranny. Look around the room and catch your breath because you have to, for the people who have been here with you and the people you have been here without them. Toss out old purses to the tune of New Beginnings or is it Opening but you know it’s Philip Glass and you don’t even think twice anymore as you condemn sweaters to Salvation Army. You are merciless; without mercy. Christen yourself ‘not the kind of person who holds onto things’, a master of getting rid of That Which You Do Not Need. This is because, and there is no other way to put it, you no longer want things that aren’t of any use.

Sweaters, handbags, people: you shed them like skin, like tears.