Boxes - Kari Burroughs Kraakevik

On my twentieth birthday, I tried to calculate how many times I had moved. Nineteen? Twenty? I settled on eighteen because it sounded better than matching the number of years I’d been alive.The day before, I had moved into a “beachside” condo in Malibu. My partner’s parents had long since abandoned it and essentially told us, “If you can clean it up, you can live there.”Free rent? Absolutely.

I started a process I was far too familiar with. After nearly twenty moves, I had become efficient at transformation. Not because anyone threatened me. Not because I enjoyed cleaning.Because I couldn’t settle otherwise.

I needed to clean, reorganize, and beautify my surroundings or I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t focus. I couldn’t relax enough to exist in a space. Disorder didn’t feel inconvenient to me. It felt physically loud.The process itself was brutal.

I opened a refrigerator still packed with rotten food. I dusted corners lined with abandoned dog feces. Somehow, weighing barely ninety pounds soaking wet, I carried three armchairs stained with cat urine down three flights of stairs to the dumpster by myself.

But I was determined.

My partner had spent the day in classes. She moved her belongings in one carload and left everything in the middle of the living room because it was the only visible floor space left. I think she expected me to uncover a bed. Maybe wipe down the counters.Not redecorate the entire condo like my nervous system depended on it.

After dinner with friends stretched deep into the early morning, she came back to a condo she barely recognized. The floors gleamed. The furniture had been rearranged. Windows were opened. Candles flickered in corners that, hours earlier, smelled like rot.

I hadn’t eaten, slept, or even stopped long enough to use the bathroom in over seventeen hours.The condo, though, was spotless.

She was shocked.

I was too exhausted to speak.

I peeled off my filthy clothes in the kitchen, ran a bath I had already scrubbed three separate times, rinsed the tub again for good measure, and cried.

I was clean.

It was clean.

And for the first time since we arrived, my body believed I was safe enough to stay.I remembered the authority I was given every time we moved as a child: I could decorate my room however I wanted.

As if that small illusion of control would soften the fact that we were moving again.It didn’t.

But it did distract me.

Every move began the same way. My boxes would arrive labeled only: “Kari’s Room.” I never bothered listing the contents because I already knew I would unpack everything the same day we moved in.

First, I made a floor chart.

I unpacked each box into piles, leaving walking paths between them like little roads. Then I discarded the boxes entirely so all that remained were the contents of my life spread across the carpet: remnants from another city, another house, another short-lived version of home.
Looking at the piles never overwhelmed me.

It quieted me.

“Why don’t you listen to your Discman while you unpack?” my father would ask. “You could stick it in those giant cargo pants of yours and keep going.”
I would roll my eyes.

“I’m not unpacking, Dad.”

I slammed the door.

“I’m living.”

We were an unusual household. There were no required family dinners. Sometimes no dinners at all. Independence was treated like competence, even in children.

I would disappear into my room for twenty-four, sometimes thirty-six hours. 

Unshowered. Unfed. I’m fairly certain I got my first kidney infection this way.

But when I emerged, the room would be complete.

It would look like I had lived there for years.

Photos arranged on shelves. Drawings pinned carefully to the walls. My tiny china cabinet filled with trinkets and teacups. Dolls displayed from early childhood. Spelling Bee trophies positioned like I had just won them the week before.

I was even allowed to paint the walls.

Usually forests.

Sometimes meadows.

Anything that felt quiet.

Outside my room, the house remained unfamiliar. New furniture. New sounds. I never knew where the silverware was. I stumbled through dark hallways trying to find light switches that had not yet entered my muscle memory.

But inside my room, everything existed exactly where I needed it to.

Inside my room, I was safe.

For most of my life, unpacking meant survival.

Then I got married.

During my first marriage, I never unpacked all of my “Kari’s Room” boxes.
I kept meaning to get to them, but somehow five years passed.

Instead, I fit myself into someone else’s life. Their massive house. Their routines. Their version of adulthood.

There was more space than I knew what to do with. I even had my own office and a small recording studio with wallpaper trees that reminded me of the forests I painted on my bedroom walls as a child.

Still, the boxes remained stacked in the corners.

Untouched.

It felt insignificant at first. A procrastination issue. A busy season. But slowly, my sense of home — and maybe my sense of self — began vanishing in plain sight.

As much as I wanted this new reality of marriage, my body never fully relaxed inside it.

Not even enough to unpack.

And I ignored that feeling for years.

For most of my life, people described me as organized.

Disciplined. Efficient. Good at creating calm.

What they didn’t understand was that I wasn’t creating beauty for aesthetic reasons. I was creating safety. My nervous system could not fully rest until the environment around me felt predictable enough to trust.

I thought everyone experienced space this way.

I later learned many neurodivergent people do.

Then I got sick.

Sicker.

Doctors tested me for everything they could think of. Most results came back negative. 

Others came back inconclusive.

Meanwhile, hives spread across my body in waves. They covered my arms, my legs, my scalp. The inside of my mouth. My ears. Even my eyes.

Every night, I cried from the pain.

Eventually, I drove myself to the emergency room. I apologized at the front desk for coming because I didn’t think it was technically urgent.

I was brought back within five minutes.

A doctor walked in and sat beside the bed.

“Tell me what’s going on at home.”

I remember blinking at him.

What did that have to do with anything?

“I thought while we pump you full of prednisone,” he said gently, “you could tell me about your home situation.”

Home.  What a strange word.

So I told him about my picture-perfect wedding. About being published in bridal magazines. About getting married a mere day after same-sex marriage became legal. About the hashtag we made before branded hashtags were even really a thing.

I told him about the beautiful house. The recording studio. The animals. The little therapy dog my wife bought specifically for me.

“So you’re happy?” he asked.

I laughed a little.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Aren’t you a doctor?”

“Yes,” he said. “These are just routine questions.”

He handed me a screening form instead.

I started filling it out automatically, then stopped.

Slowly, I erased several of my answers.

I checked different boxes instead.

The “right” boxes.

I was surprised how many answers I changed.

By the time the prednisone started working, I was already being discharged.

I drove myself home.

My wife hadn’t realized I was gone.

The next year passed in a blur. Though while I was living it, time felt completely frozen.
I started moving my still-packed boxes to my business instead. Somehow, the storefront felt more like home than my actual home did.

I wasn’t ready to acknowledge the marriage was failing yet, but hiding my belongings in little corners and storage closets at work made me feel strangely secure.

By then, I had moved more than twenty-eight boxes.

My wife never noticed they were gone.

Instead, she thanked me for cleaning the garage.

I planned my exit carefully. I didn’t want to ruin the holidays, so I made them especially beautiful that year.

We had multiple Christmas trees because we had combined ornaments when we got married. I volunteered to take the decorations down afterward.

Secretly, I packed my ornaments separately.

I hid the boxes in my car and brought them to work one load at a time.

“Wow,” she said once, laughing. “You’re really good at this Christmas stuff.”

“I love how organized you are.”

I smiled through tears.

Weeks later, during another inevitable fight, I finally heard the sentence I had been waiting for.

“Well maybe you should just leave, then.”

So I did.

I grabbed my dog, got in the car, and never came back.

Later, my brothers packed the remaining contents of my closet and furniture into a single moving truck. Everything else had already been removed piece by piece over the previous year.

No one had noticed.

The next few months, I unpacked slowly.

Not with the ferocity of my childhood. Not like Malibu.

Still, I made little maps on the floor with piles and pathways between them. Some instincts never leave the body entirely.

The empty boxes sat in corners for months before I finally broke them down and carried them outside.

When I did, it felt strangely monumental.

I moved more than thirty-two boxes from my business into my new home, my new life, and realized something was different this time.

Or maybe I finally understood what had always been different.

For the first time in my life, this move had been my choice.

I chose to leave.

I chose where to go.

I chose the house.

I chose the life waiting inside it.

I knew where the silverware was.

I knew where the light switches were.

And for the first time in my life, I unpacked because I wanted to stay.