How to Properly Pack and Stow Emotional Baggage After Your Ex Gets Married

Step one:

Carefully consider all items you’d like to pack.

Step two:

Spend years agonizing over these items before violently shoving them to the back of your mental closet in a fit of rage, vowing to never speak of them again.

Step three:

Remove items and organize them into neat piles.

Step four:

Fold up all regrets. Take extra care with specialty regret items, like the five years spent in a languishing long-distance relationship until he up and married a Japanese software developer not two years after you broke up. Who even does that.

Gently place these items in your suitcase.

Step five:

In a smaller bag, carefully stow the sinking feeling that you’re running out of time. Wrap that bag in bubble wrap and place it inside the back pocket of your suitcase. Please note that this will never fully silence that incessant ticking sound.

Step six:

Throw in the possibility that this might be as good as it gets, and that maybe you should’ve just listened to your dad and studied for those fucking LSATS so you could one day marry a successful white lawyer.*

*All unresolved issues with your parents must be placed into clear, plastic baggies.

Step seven:

In a new bag, tuck in any loose items you’d also like to forget: skinny jeans that remind you of your eighteen-year-old body, or perhaps a beat-up tennis racket that reeks of failed athletic expectations.

We recommend using the Samsonite Hypertech Lite carry-on for this.

Step eight:

Push down the rising thought that life is devoid of meaning, and that we’re all just insignificant organisms awaiting death when you really think about it. Push this thought all the way down to the bottom of your suitcase, until you no longer feel it. But don’t worry — it will never actually disappear. Ever.

Step eight:

Pack up all the good memories of him. Toss in the reality that someone who knew every part of you — the crazy, the serious, the chin-acne, the entirety of you — is gone. That you’ll probably never see him again, and that he seems really happy now that his soul’s entwined with another person. Or at least that’s what Facebook tells you.

Step nine:

Toss your ex’s Facebook engagement photos into the deepest, darkest part of your suitcase.

Step ten:

Stack up every childhood fantasy you had of finding eternal love and fame by the age of 25, and the fantasy where you learned to cook anything beyond pasta with Ragu sauce. Laugh hysterically. Then cry.

Step eleven:

Carefully weigh luggage. No more than 50lbs of unrelenting melancholy per bag, please.*

*Oversized bags may incur extra charges.

Step twelve:

Find a void. Throw luggage into said void.

Step thirteen:

Wait for it to fill up and for you to become whole again.

Step fourteen:

When that doesn’t work, pick up tennis again. Yay!