VOLUME III: 54 – Boxes From NY

Jules is moving.

Not just across town.
Not just “let’s rent a U-Haul and curse at traffic” moving.

This is Brooklyn-to-San-Francisco, start-a-whole-new-life, “goodbye rats in the subway, hello $17 avocado toast” kind of moving.

Which meant this wasn’t just help-a-friend-carry-boxes day. This was carry boxes, listen to Jules explain the philosophical merits of coaxial cables, and quietly reassess your own life choices day.

It ended up being just the four of us.

Amy is in Canada (“Would love to help, but I’m literally across an ocean, soz <3”), and Basil was allegedly busy (“You guys will be fine without me. Also, my back hurts just thinking about it”).

So the crew was just us.

Jules: Theoretically, the person being helped.
Sasha: Chaos personified, wearing shorts in forty-degree weather.
Noah: Calm, methodical, the only one with an actual dolly.
Me: Already regretting this.

Jules’ new apartment was three blocks from HQ, a fact she’d announced earlier in the week with the pride of someone unveiling a priceless artifact.

“Imagine,” she’d said on our group call, eyes lit like fairy lights. “I could be at HQ in three minutes. Two if I skateboard. One if I… tunnel.”

Now, standing on the sidewalk, she tilted her head back, squinting at the building like it was the final boss in a game she had been speedrunning for months.

“I love it,” she breathed, reverent, the way some people get about sunsets or cathedrals. “It smells like ethernet.”

It didn’t. It smelled like the bakery next door — sweet, warm, with just enough caramelized sugar to start plotting my dietary downfall.

The move itself was… chaos.

Sasha, self-appointed Captain Logistics, took one sweeping look at the mountain of boxes and decided the real challenge wasn’t getting them upstairs, it was getting them all into the elevator at once.

“We just need optimal spatial reasoning,” she muttered, wedging a microwave between two enormous monitor boxes with the intensity of someone solving world peace.

Jules clasped her hands like she’d just fixed the internet. “Yes! Yes! That’s exactly how you’d pack a server rack!”

Meanwhile, Noah — already on his fourth trip carrying boxes labelled BOOKS (HEAVY) — passed by with one marked CABLES (DON’T TANGLE) in Sharpie so aggressive it left dents in the cardboard.

“Why does every single one of her boxes weigh the same as a small planet?” he asked, barely winded, which was irritating in its own right.

“They’re mostly hard drives,” Jules called cheerfully, lugging a plastic tote in one hand and a bag of instant noodles in the other. “I kept all my old builds. You never know when you’ll need to boot up Windows XP to run a 2002 cat screensaver.”

I stared at her. “That’s… a very specific need.”

“That’s a necessary need.”

Halfway through, Sasha and I opened what we thought was the kitchen box. It was wires. Miles of them.

“Why—” Sasha began, holding up a black coil like a dead snake.

“These are USB-powered mug warmers,” Jules interrupted, plucking one out like an archaeologist revealing a relic. “Hot drinks, hot heart.”

Sasha blinked. “Where are your actual kitchen things?”

“Oh, I don’t own any,” she said simply, as if cookware was an urban myth. “I just order takeout. But sometimes I pretend I’m going to start cooking, so I plug the mug warmer in.”

Later, I opened a mystery box labelled misc tech. Inside:

A Nintendo DS from 2006.
Four power banks.
A smoke alarm that beeped when I touched it.
One decorative spoon.

We didn’t ask. Some truths you just aren’t ready for.

By the third hour, we were deep into furniture Tetris.

Noah and I were locked in a quiet but deadly debate over whether her couch would fit through the apartment door.

“It’s simple,” Jules said, crouching beside us and — of course — producing a measuring tape from her hoodie pocket like a magician revealing a dove. “Door width is thirty-two inches. Couch is… uh…” She frowned at the tape. “Some number bigger than that.”

We ended up hauling it up the stairwell sideways, a process that took so long and involved so much swearing that Sasha nearly lost his grip twice. Jules filmed the entire thing “for reference” in case she ever needed to debug a couch.

By 7 PM, the place looked… semi-inhabitable.

Jules’ desk was already set up, triple monitors glowing like the bridge of a spaceship. Her router hummed smugly beside it, all green lights, ignoring the still-boxed kitchenware and the mattress leaning against the wall.

“Priorities,” Jules said, sipping from a boba cup she’d ordered. The delivery driver had stepped over a box of tangled USB cables just to hand it to her.

Sasha sat cross-legged on the floor, eating instant ramen out of the pot. Jules was under her desk, zip-tying cables like she was performing open-heart surgery. Noah leaned against the doorframe, pretending not to watch Sasha’s spine fold into a permanent question mark.

I slouched against the couch’s armrest, catching my breath. For all the chaos, the wires, the mug warmers, and the couch ordeal, there was something oddly satisfying about it. Like we’d all just survived a very strange war together.

My phone buzzed, the vibration cutting through the hum of Jules muttering about “data flow.” I fished it out without thinking.

Krei:
You up for dinner?
Got an extra reservation. Free food.

Free food. Extra reservation.

My stomach, traitor that it was, growled.

Sure, I typed back before I could think of a reason not to.

Yeah. I could probably eat dinner.