Things left behind

My father and I walk through rooms, half rooms, quarter rooms, tags hanging from the closet units, the footstools, the lampshades, saying wouldn't this plant look pretty beneath my window, these new shelves for your familiar books. Then we put a few white candles in the cart and shuttle swedish prefab furniture home to a house furbished in sleek white antiquity. New York across the sea I am wearing the new green dress, allwide pocket in the front like a marsupial pouch.
It rains in Bielefeld of course, the day I arrive because my father promised it was perfect sunshine all last week. But I am not dissappointed, this is the german gray I recognize. morning dawns unfamiliarly bright and we visit Bärenort, the Bear-place (brick house, birch trees) where I discover things I left behind. like uncovering, abandoned in an attic, the incomplete remnants of some stranger's life—except that this was my life and nothing is so strange, only for a time forgotten. these shirts that no longer fit, those coats that never did. the lavender left in the wardrobe, the blue pillow, the pens run dry; letters discarded, piled on blank postcards, misplaced copy of Howards End (there it was,the mystery solved), sketchbook, watchchain, accordioncase, rice-paper lightcover. not everything exactly as I left it, but exactly everything I left and, for the most part, never thought of afterward.
Why so many things? stuffed in our pockets, in pouches of our ever growing belly, the widths and breadths and bottoms, basements bowels, of our houses, saved, stored, sequestered. we've sunk into the ocean of objects swallowing up all space to breathe, think in. or at least I have, even here the more noticeable because there is more space to move my limbs in, space that is still enough to overtake the many things i fill it with. brought from another home, bought at flea markets, borrowed from someone else's discarded storage. Before flying I worried for days about what to bring, what not to, anticipating what I might need or use, what I would want to have. Now I wonder how much I left behind that I will never miss.
Things already forgotten, what fails? Just people, places, moments.