Yesterday, I started removing artwork from the walls in my office, our bedroom, the living room, and the guest room. I went through two baskets of papers that represent at least the past ten years of our lives-- performance evaluations from past jobs, faded receipts for the digital camera and the laptop, lists of debts and my ambitious, handwritten plans for repaying them, cards from friends, from people who have been on trips with me who I thought I would always remember but haven't, and stacks of Francisco's immigration documents. I looked through 20 antiquated floppy disks and wasted 30 minutes looking for a company that would recycle them. I started what is, for me, the most painful task-- sorting books into piles of those I'll sell or give away and those with which I could never bear to part. I pulled a drawerful of journals out of my desk, including a journal that Francisco and I kept during the first year of our relationship. On this day, four years ago, I wrote, "Tonight I almost walked the Queensboro Bridge...." I sorted pictures into stacks, feeling nostalgic about the fact that we rarely print photos anymore, but just store them on the USB. I went through folders of poems and articles marked "Good Things to Read," and I found, among them, Naomi Shihab Nye's powerfully appropriate, "Adios," and I taped it to the wall over my now empty desk.

So many different feelings have seized me over the past two days as echoes begin to fill what was our home and is quickly becoming just an apartment. I am beginning to let go of this place, but it is not without occasional and sudden fits of wanting to hang on desperately. Francisco wants to contract a moving service to pack everything and ship it back to New York... which I vowed we would never do again, after having had a terrible experience getting everything here in the first place. We have had a variation on the same conversation 17 times: What should we sell and what should we save? The pitcher and glasses that were a gift from Scarlett Johansson, who contracted Francisco to be her private chef when she vacationed here last year. The beds that belonged to my grandmother, which my mother--with tremendous difficulty, I know--said we could sell because "your lifestyle just isn't suited for keeping things." Our bureau. The vanity. A beautiful, long buffet table we rescued from the garbage in Brooklyn. When we saw it, we both just looked at each other and immediately crossed the street, without a word, and rented a U-Haul. A 1940s desk with brass corners that was military issue...also rescued from the garbage in Queens. We'd just been talking about the fact that we needed a desk when we looked out the window and saw someone leaving it on the curb. The bookshelf that Francisco built for me, which the thought of leaving behind makes me crazy with pain. I watched him build it, I have the plans he drew for it tucked into a notebook. I remember going to Home Depot--one of my very least favorite places--with him to choose the moulding I wanted across the top. I've sorted the books that it holds into sections, the studious and stern clerk of our own little library. I am always stunned, when we move, about how many relics of life we accummulate, and I vacillate between wanting to hang onto everything and wanting to get rid of it all. I am, at times, temporarily paralyzed by trying to figure out what is necessary to save (how many years of tax returns should you keep?!) and what is okay to throw away.

Neighbors call. Maritza visits, tells me to stay here, finish my PhD at El Centro... "es mas barato," she says, cheaper than Columbia and NYU, where I'll be applying soon as a transfer student. She offers to store our furniture, to let me stay in her guest room, to find us another apartment in San Juan, anything to make it possible for us to stay. I'm so grateful for her offers and her friendship, but I can't articulate why we can't live here anymore. I just want to push the fast forward button and have all of this done. Arturo and Violeta don't know, yet, that we're leaving. I always loved to look into our own apartment from Arturo's home... I saw from the outside how warm it was, how much care had been taken to make it a home. I don't want to tell him we'll be gone soon--Francisco leaves in just a week--and so I avoided his phone call tonight. Robert has said he'll buy anything we don't take with us, and our conversation starts again... what to keep? What to save?

This time next week, Francisco will be at home in New York. He will have said his final goodbye to this apartment that has been our home for almost three years, good-bye to a place that has been difficult for us, but which has also--like anywhere and everywhere--been amazing in so many ways. When we first moved here, we threw open our windows every morning and laughed with delight-- it was always blue! Always sunny! It seems right, then, that this week has been overcast and rainy. For now, we sit surrounded by our life, organized into piles, fit into boxes, tossed into bags. I know I won't feel at ease until this is done, until my "adios" is complete....

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Adios 

It is a good word, rolling off the tongue no matter what language you were born with. Use it. Learn where it begins, the small alphabet of departure, how long it takes to think of it, then say it, then be heard. Marry it. More than any golden ring, it shines, it shines. Wear it on every finger till your hands dance, touching everything easily, letting everything, easily, go. Strap it to your back like wings. Or a kite-tail. The stream of air behind a jet. If you are known for anything, let it be the way you rise out of sight when your work is finished. Think of things that linger: leaves, cartons and napkins, the damp smell of mold. Think of things that disappear. Think of what you love best, what brings tears to your eyes. Something that said adios to you before you knew what it was meant or how long it was for. Explain little, the word explains itself. Later perhaps. Lessons following lessons, like silence following sound.

-Naomi Shihab Nye, from Words Under the Words.