Everything Fits Hats

There is a confidence at the start of a move that never survives contact with the afternoon. Everything fits, obviously — it all came out of one house, so it will all go into another one. This reasoning is airtight and completely wrong, and by four o'clock there is a category of object called 'the rest of it' being carried loose, by hand, in several trips. The other universal is the boxes that never open. They get taped, carried, driven, carried again, stacked in a spare room, and then simply live there — through the unpacking, past the first year, occasionally through a second move, still sealed, contents unknown and evidently unnecessary. These are first-person throughout and nobody is blamed — not the friends who helped, not the movers, not the previous occupant. The target is the wearer's own optimism, reassessed with the benefit of a long day. The last hour is the one nobody photographs. The system has collapsed, the labels have stopped meaning anything, and objects are being carried loose to a car in whatever order they present themselves. That is the hour the box marked MISC is born.