In the depths of winter.

It's fair to point out that it shouldn't have taken so long, and yet, it's still taking so long, clearing out the ruins of my old place, which I've held onto in a numb instinct that I've joked is me using my old apartment as the most expensive storage space in the world. I've hung up on a technicality, the real and present difficulty of combining the homes of two people who are driven to collect, curate, and store up against the possibility that such things won't come our way again, but I'm tired, and this year has been tired, a soul-draining series of endings, closing doors, bad news, laments, regrets, and reminders of my finitude and the beatings of the process of having run out my youth, when energy was as abundant as wisdom was absent, all set against the absurdist spectacle of watching the landscape around me being overrun with monsters, stomping their way to the seats of power with misery in their wake.

It occurs, as I pick up object after object, the value of memory flowing into my hands like an electrical current, that maybe I've been slowed by the trauma, without realizing it, of what I was doing.

I spent decades making a life and a home out of whole cloth, on my own and with those who traveled with me, out of moments and stories told and hidden, out of the little things I've found in the world and charged with the fizzing, thrilling static of life lived and those who have lived it with me. I pick up a thing to determine where it'll be packed, thinking, in the moment, how sad it feels that it'll be relegated to a box meant to be carried to a genuine storage unit to be uncovered when I've cleared the primary obstacle in my path to living fully again in the next life that's nothing so fanciful as an afterlife. I hold a thing and it feels warm with something other than physics, and I feel my heart in my throat as I wrap it in crumpled newspaper and slot it in with a cardboard box carrying both everything and nothing at once.

As the spaces empty, they curl up, almost, into a box of lint and loose screws, and what I'd kept there has gone to storage, the new place, and the pile of discarded things awaiting a dumpster rental, and it's all just too much, too much in this dreadful year of too much too soon, and I hang, suspended, too overwhelmed to catch a breath. My friend helped me hang the art that used to hang there, in pride of place, and now he's long gone and the artwork is wrapped in cellophane like a corpse, going who knows where. My friend sat on the sofa with me watching movies on a tiny television, and now she's gone, and soon enough, the sofa will be strapped on a roof rack to go to storage, where it'll stand on end until it finds a new place.

My mouth dries out sometimes, and it's all just ashes, just dried leaves ready for the wind to come and take it. I spent decades building this place and now I'm unbuilding it, piece by piece, and it feels too fast, and too cold, and too far beyond any chance of a proper curation of sacred relics, and things are going faster and faster. I drive past a favorite restaurant, and it's closed now, and I roll down the old drags I've crossed a thousand times with a car full of laughing idiots on our way to small adventures and wonderful discoveries, and those times you'll never explain sufficiently in a way that can convey the joy found there.

My friend always said my road trips, which he called "road farming" in his Indiana vernacular were amazing, except for the last forty-five minutes, which always blunted the delight of the preceding hours, and as I round the corner with a carload of boxes to haul to storage, I'm reminded of one of those trips to nowhere, where the alternator on my ancient Saab gave up the ghost almost exactly forty-five minutes out, forcing us into a frightening run for home with the car running off the battery alone, and we hit that corner with the battery so near exhaustion that, in the twilight darkness, the headlights were as dim as candles. We coasted into the parking lot of the Saab garage by the train station, the car dead for the duration, and my friend turned to me with a raised eyebrows, saying "See? Forty-five minutes."

"Bitch," I said to him, and we unloaded three hundred miles of yard sale and thrift store finds to set off on foot for our respective homes.

I carefully wrap the two elegant candlesticks I got on that trip, put them in a box, and seal the box for the next storage run, writing "417 SPECIAL THINGS" on the box and adding it to the stack.

I feel exhausted lately, in that functional way where my alternator's no longer charging my battery, and I just have to make it home. Checking off items on my to-do list, I get the key to my old motorcycle and go around the side of the house to roll it back into the basement, where it should be safe while I figure out its fate, but when I get there, I find that, over the course of the week between when I last checked on it, someone came through with tools and tore the ignition apart to try and steal the Blue Angel.

Heart's in my throat again, and I'm angry and sad but I'm too punch drunk from losses to even really feel it, and it's one more thing that's just ashes, ashes, quivering as the wind picks up. "Joke's on you, assholes," I said to no one in particular, "It didn't even run," but even that reminds me how I'd tried and failed to fix the inexplicable problem with the carburetor that left it immobile.

I look at the poor thing, faded and sad now, and remind myself that it was the vehicle that got my to my first Northeast Electro-Music Festival, twelve years ago, and that the friends I made there, and the connections I established, and the collaborations that carry on, even now, which took me from a place where I'd almost given up on making art altogether to where I am now, making the best music I ever made.

"I'm sorry," I say to a motorcycle, realizing it too, is just turning to ashes along with everything, but I have a flush of gratitude, too, that it played a pivotal part in a big phase change in my life, tempered with a reminder that the sunk-cost fallacy is a thing, and I add items to my to-do list for the continuing unwind. As the sun sets, I can't help but feel like my home is now just a tombstone, now that no one's living in any of the apartments and that's when everything goes to ashes. I add an extra item to my to-do to collect my old stereo and the lovely big Klipsch speakers that broke the bank back in 1989 before the kind of people who hacked my poor old bike get ambitous enough to get into the house.

I pack out one last carload for the day's labor, carry it over to the storage space where I once got stuck carrying the entire life's work of a complicated artist on my barely five-figure salary, just a few rows away in the sterile ranks of the indoor storage, and carefully stack things up, then head out, stop by the house again to pick up the old plastic Christmas tree that's going to be doing duty in my new home since the last month's situations kept us from getting a proper one, and leave.

And it's been a hell of a year, a soul-draining series of endings, closing doors, bad news, laments, regrets, and reminders of my finitude and the beatings of the process of having run out my youth, when energy was as abundant as wisdom was absent, all set against the absurdist spectacle of watching the landscape around me being overrun with monsters, and sometimes I worry that the way I've been feeling is becoming ossified into a general pessimism that'll never let up, but I'm reminded that I know now what I knew then—that art and music and love and joy and the company of wonderful people are the alternators of a life, there to charge the batteries again even when everything feels dead and burned to ash, to lift us up again and set us moving, back out into a world that's still lush with possibilities, even as we have to dodge the massive footprints of monsters on their rampages.

I recline into familiar music and art and it's enough light, candles against the dark, and I ask my friends only for forebearance as I collect myself, and I know this all will pass, if maybe not soon.

At home, at the new home that's only just starting to be made again into something to suit both my partner and me, I dump a plastic tree unceremoniously into the living room, then I kick off my shoes, peel off my socks, drop my trousers in favor of my comfy pyjama pants, fade into the room with the comfy couch, where I take a chance on something on the screen that proves to hold a perfect little moment where the story carries me aloft and reminds me that, in spite of everything, and even in a world that seems like it's all just ashes, there is an unstoppable light in art, where something can still reach me and give me something to cry about that achieves that by connecting me into the cosmic electrical system of ecstatic, invulnerable joy.

I turn the key and everything roars back, and I'm ready for road farming again, and seeing what's out there, and even though I know it will be a temporary relief, I know it persists, and will continue to until I run out of road.

« Au milieu de l’hiver, j’ai découvert en moi un invincible été. »
—Albert Camus

So let the world turn to ashes. The winds will come, ashes will blow away, and here I will be with my arms out, standing firm and saying "Joke's on you, assholes!" to no one in particular.

I will be here.

©2025 Joe Belknap Wall