When I was growing up in Texas, I was organised and tidy – annoyingly so. I went to sleep at night looking forward to making the bed the next morning, and took great delight in meticulously washing and drying the dishes by hand and ensuring that the vacuum cleaner left precisely proportionate tracks on the carpet.
Somewhere down the line, my daily routines underwent a radical change. After graduating from college in New York, I commenced a life of almost obsessive-compulsive itinerancy, darting between countries and continents and fleeing the notion of a fixed residence. I nonetheless continued to accumulate possessions in all of these countries, which, given the impossibility of travelling with all of them at once, I proceeded to scatter across other countries at the abodes of friends and lesser acquaintances.
While the chaotic arrangement was certainly liberating in its own way, it also resulted in a scattered sense of self – even as I feigned some sort of control over my universe by scribbling lists of what belongings I had left where. . . READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.