Out from above the boiler room

It's easy to romanticize (or sentimentalize) the process of moving house. I'm presently packing up the dormitory room where I've been ensconced for the last two years; I imagined myself lovingly going through the bits and pieces of two years' worth of life as a student at Oxford, doing a triage of thing to keep and things to throw away, and things to gaze at for a while before closing my eyes and dropping it into the dustbin. In the end it was about nothing so much as shoving stuff into boxes as quickly as I could, and noting how unimposing and dusty the things looked as I threw them into storage: flurry, then; and an underlying sadness at leaving a tiny space in which I had been comfortable. The bed where I had read my way to a Master's degree looked uncommonly ugly in the way that only college dormitory beds can look without their covers. Tossing out readings should have been a cathartic process but the main sensation was physical, of paper cuts and grime and sneezing out dustballs. The room, as I look around it, seems unbelievably small: a burnt-out, shrunken shell, papered over in college-issue paisley prints. No, no sentimentality here; just sadness and an eagerness to move on.