I was packed before he woke up.
This was not insomnia and it was not anxiety, or it was not only those things. It was the older habit, the one that had been installed in me by years of living in a house where being ready before you were asked was the difference between managing a situation and being managed by it. My father had never given warning for anything. Not for the rages and not for the moves and not for the decisions that restructured your life without consulting you about the restructuring, and so I had learned to be packed in the metaphorical sense always, to keep my interior life organized and accessible and ready to be picked up and carried at short notice.
The literal version of this had apparently survived into the new circumstances.
I had folded everything with the caref
