When I step into his apartment, I am walking backwards, struggling to pull the bottom end of a refrigerator through the door. There is the delicious and spicy smell of something cooking somewhere in a room I can’t see yet, and he tells me that his girlfriend has a pork pozole simmering in their slow cooker. I pause for a moment, try to grip the bottom of the fridge a little tighter and deeply inhale—it is, indeed, delicious as he has already said.

Waylon is almost 30, has a dark shaggy beard with similar shaggy hair and sometimes when I see him at the pub he looks like he’s about to wander off into the wilderness with a bag of rice and a dream in search of a bus he doesn’t know he will eventually find. It is fun to watch him as we climb the stairs because he cannot stop grinning from ear to ear. He makes his own beer and now he’s about to have something that he’s wanted to build for several years now, only this one is free and comes with all the required parts.

We climb three flights of stairs carrying a kegerator—my now-old kegerator—and I am almost spent when we get to his front door, but the smell of the pozole helps to push me through the door, into the living room, onto the deck where the kegerator will find its new home. I am giving it away because I am trying to rid my life of as many possessions as possible, because I think that I am tired of living like a teenage boy, because I am tired of possessions that require maintenance, because I am getter closer to shaking up my life in a way that will alter my geography and possibly my profession.

Later, when I get home and walk into the space where my kegerator used to be, I can breathe a little easier, and I can breathe more deeply because there is more room, more space. And it feels good in some unknown place beneath layers of weathered skin because now there are less things weighing me down, less things attached to my shell. I want my life to be more fluid. Crave it, really, like a hunger for air. Getting rid of things makes me feel light, like I can float, like I can hover somewhere above the ground and beneath the clouds.

I have—for several years now—been giving away my possessions. I have been giving more of them away in the past year because I have become aware of how many things I no longer want or need. I give things away to friends, to strangers, to acquaintances, to charities. I have been giving things away that have always had value to me but no longer seem to matter: kegerator, movies, music, books, gear, electronic equipment. And my friends, they have been a little concerned, they want to know if I’m ok, if everything is all right, if I am having dark or otherwise morbid thoughts. I laugh at this, laugh because I would not rob even one second from my very delightful life, but I appreciate that they ask, appreciate that I have people in my life who would ask such a thing.

Giving things away—at least for me—is easy. I am not attached, not in any deep or meaningful way to most of what I own, but I have not always been this way. I could, I know, watch everything burn into a bright red intensity and simply walk away without wanting or needing to replace most of what melted into the flame. There is one thing though, the one thing that has always been consistent in my needs, my wants, my desires: my motorcycle.

So I keep giving things away, moving objects from here into some other space that has nothing to do with me. I give things to Goodwill, to friends, to strangers. And this feels good, so good, that I grin each time something leaves my hands and gently falls into the hands of another. The kegerator is just the beginning of me getting rid of larger possessions, larger things that no longer have value in my life. I smile when I think about this, smile when I find someone who wants something that I have—and I deliver it to them as a way of saying “thanks for taking this off my hands.”

And so I sit at my favorite bar, drink my favorite beer, read one of my favorite authors, and savor this feeling of lightness, of being unattached, of moving into the next space.