Shanna Germain

One Person's Forever is Another Person's Summer

"It's amazing what you can fit in to these small cars, isn't it," says Adrian at Storage World, watching me load up my boxes. I don’t think it's in his job description to help with any lifting.

"Yes, Adrian," I say. "My entire life."

I only say this because that's what people always say when they pack up their physical possessions, but I don’t really believe it. I'm more romantic than that and I like to think my life fits in footprints on mountains and in pictures I took in the desert — not in fifteen cardboard boxes jammed into the back of a Nissan Micra.

But it does, of course. I slam the boot shut, say goodbye to Adrian, and shift my entire life over the river to the other side of town. Then I sit down on my new bedroom floor and pick through the boxes. I have too much shit, I think, for someone who moves house once every six months. Definitely too many books, anyway. People love giving me books. They mistake me for a reader because I'm so great at spelling. I can spell pretty much anything right first time — even 'accommodation', which was the most frequently misspelled word of last year, according to a survey in the New York Times — but I can't read a book from start to finish.

Here's one now: a tattered yet never-read copy of The Grapes of Wrath. Inside the front cover someone has written:

With love forever, John.

Forever! I only vaguely remember him. Hmm. Yeah, I vaguely remember him eventually getting together with another girl in college named Summer.

"One person's forever is another person's summer," I say out loud, throwing the book back into the box and laughing at my own joke.

The house is quiet. I pull a blanket out of a bag and curl up with it on the floor between all the boxes. This is my usual response to having loads of stuff to sort out: take a nap. I can't sleep though, it's only midday, so I just stare up at the ceiling for a while and think about the future.

I've moved in with a lovely woman, as her lodger, in my favourite part of Dublin. It's only a temporary arrangement while I work on my temporary job, which is on a temporary TV drama about the building of a temporary ship they called the Titanic. They didn't realise while they were building it, of course, that it would only be a temporary ship: it was another thing on the long list of things that are meant to last forever. My screenwriting teacher, Mary Kate, says this is classic dramatic irony. And that just means the audience know the characters are fucked before they do.

Filming will last until November, then the sets will be torn down and the crew will go home and my equipment will be packed back up in to boxes. I'll take them to Adrian at Storage World again and then what? Go back to America, I think, and take more photographs of the desert. But when I'd said that to Megan she'd shrugged and said hey, who knows what'll happen between now and November.

There's an old fireplace in my room and I get up off the floor and start stacking some of the books up on top of it. Maybe this year I'll try to finish some of them — then I can give them away again. I have too much shit, I think, for someone who has no forever.