Me, My Shelf, and I

So I continue to pace and dodge stacks of boxes. You might say, it’s not that I haven’t fully unpacked — but that I’m already halfway packed out. Weeks keep going by, and out of this in-between, paralyzed moment, the real stares back at me. — Jake Marmer

My father’s years as a flight lieutenant in the Royal Canadian Air Force entailed family moves every two or three years. That meant arriving in a new neighbourhood and school, sometimes at mid-term, knowing nobody, learning the cliques of the base, finding whom to avoid and who might be a friend, however briefly. I loved this “gypsy life,” as my grandmother still called it, not least because each time we moved I got to unpack my stuff.

Slicing open cardboard box after cardboard box is not everybody’s idea of a good time, but when you have bundled your entire worldly existence into a few standard-size Allied Van Lines cartons, leaving out only your...