The roots of my insecurity go back to the MacBook Air I had to sell in Berlin in 2012.
Not the selling itself. The reason I had to sell it. The practice had stopped working and I did not understand why, and the laptop was the thing I sold to buy time before I understood anything. It was the wrong move. You do not sell the tool. You figure out why the tool stopped working. But I was twenty-six and broke in a foreign city and I sold it anyway, and something cracked open that took fourteen years to close.
Berlin in 2011 was still the Berlin people moved to because it was cheap and strange and full of people doing things that had not been done before. I was living near the center, Mitte, Prenzlauer Berg, close enough to feel the pulse of the thing. Then as the money dried up and the posts stopped landing I started moving outward. One neighborhood at a time. Away from the center. Toward the cheaper rents and the longer U-Bahn rides and the feeling that the city was happening somewhere else, without me.
There is a specific grief in that direction of movement. Inward to outward. Center to periphery. You tell yourself it is practical. You tell yourself the cheaper apartment gives you more time to write. What it actually gives you is more time to feel the distance between where you are and where the work is happening.
By the time I sold the MacBook Air I was far enough out that I could not feel the city anymore. That is the honest version of what happened. The laptop was the last object that still connected me to the version of myself who had arrived in Berlin with a one-bag practice and a blog that people read. When it was gone, so was he.
Fourteen years is a long time to carry a ghost object. The laptop I sold became a kind of phantom limb — I kept reaching for it in the shape of every computer I bought after. None of them felt right. Too heavy. Too much. Too much machine for what I was actually doing, which was less and less. The accumulation crept in the way it always does, not all at once but in increments, each one justifiable, each one a small betrayal of the practice I had built and then abandoned in a Berlin apartment in 2012.
I did not go back to one bag. I went the other direction. Objects multiplied. The margins filled up. I stopped counting what I owned because counting felt like an accusation.
A month ago I got a new MacBook Air and it feels just like the old one.
Same weight. Same silence. That particular quality of lightness that is not cheapness but intention — the sense that the people who made it thought carefully about what to leave out. I opened the box and held it and something in my chest shifted. Not healed. Not yet. But cracked open in the other direction this time. The way a window opens. Not the way a floor gives out.
I feel like I can start over.
This is the point of this blog: pack it down to one bag and go. That was always the point. I would like to go and never look back. Even if going is staying right here in Chicago.
Chicago is not a place people usually describe as a destination. It is a place people are from, or a place people pass through, or a place people end up. I ended up here and then I stayed, and for a long time staying felt like the opposite of going. Like I had stopped. Like the practice of movement had calcified into something I only thought about instead of did.
But going was never only about geography. The one-bag life was always about what you were willing to be without. What you could leave behind. The city is just the backdrop. The bag is the argument.
Staying in Chicago while wanting to go is its own kind of practice. You pack the bag. You maintain the discipline of the inventory. You do not accumulate. You do not let the margins fill. You stay ready. That is the going-while-staying. Not a metaphor. A daily decision.
Right now my backpack contains one last Minneola Tangelo. The skin is just starting to give at the stem. I have been carrying it for three days, which means I am either savoring it or avoiding it. Unopen salami. Two-day-old bagels in a paper bag going soft. A kayaking jacket because the lake is close and the weather in Chicago is a liar. Running shorts. Coffee, whole bean, because ground coffee is a commitment to a place and whole bean is a commitment to movement. Astrals strapped to the outside net, the sandals that go everywhere, the ones that prove the bag is not just for show.
I am day-packed. The weight is low.
And still the presence of the physical things I control is haunting me. Not because there are too many of them. Because each one is a small decision I made about who I am right now. The tangelo says I am the kind of person who carries fruit. The whole bean says I have not given up on mornings. The Astrals say I still believe in the possibility of water.
The new MacBook Air is not in the bag yet. It is at home on the desk. But the fact that it exists, that it is mine, that it is light enough to go anywhere — that is already changing the weight of the room.
Some of this stuff that is tangentially connected to me needs to go in a dumpster. The gear that is almost right. The objects that represent a version of myself I am no longer running. The things I kept because getting rid of them felt like admitting something.
I am ready to admit it.
The MacBook Air I sold in Berlin was not just a computer. It was proof that the practice had been real. Selling it was proof that I had let the practice collapse. Buying a new one is not erasing that. It is picking up the thread. Fourteen years later, in a different city, with a clearer sense of what went wrong and a Minneola Tangelo I need to finally eat.
Going and staying are not opposites. You can commit to leaving without moving an inch. The commitment is what matters. The bag is what proves it.