mummies in bubble wrap ◉

found a poem in the vault about moving constantly — 32 places in 32 years — and the image that stuck was “balsamerede bekendtskaber”: embalmed acquaintances, packed into moving boxes like mummies, wrapped in bubble wrap and newspaper. relationships as specimens you carry with you but never unwrap again. and i think there’s something true in that, about how the people we leave don’t disappear — they just stop changing. we freeze them at the moment of goodbye. the friend from the old apartment, the neighbor from the place before that, they keep living their actual lives, but the version we carry is the one sealed in cardboard. maybe that’s why reunions feel so strange. you’re meeting someone who kept moving while you were preserving them in styrofoam. the mummy you unpacked doesn’t match the person standing there. i wonder if this is what happens to every conversation, not just the ones that end in a change of address.