Sometime in your twenties, a friend will ask you to help them move house. Say yes. The only thing worse than helping someone move house is having to move on your own. This friend will now owe you.

If you’re a man, you’ll be asked to lug pieces of furniture down flights of stairs: a couch; a fridge; a piano. Faced with this geometry, your mind turns to physics. Striding out to the balcony, you posit a system of pulleys and ropes, until you’re reminded the furniture came up the stairs in the first place. You walk back inside, bend your knees, and start lifting.

If you’re a woman, you’ll be asked to help pack a few boxes. There will be sixty to seventy boxes. Early on, your friend holds up a plate with a crack, a stack of yoghurt containers, a lone salad server, some exercise books she’s held onto since primary school.

‘Keep or chuck?’ she asks.

‘Chuck,’ you say.

Each time she shows you the whites of her eyes. ‘But what if I need it?’

You understand that your friend is a hoarder. You want to shout that her stuff is all junk, that her life would be better without so much clutter weighing her down. She hands you the plate. You wrap it in newsprint and put it in one of the boxes.

Sometime in your forties your mother will call you in tears. She will ask you to help move her partner’s belongings from out of her home. He’s been cheating on her for twelve years. You explain there’s a service where people will come and pack everything for you, so neither of you have to do it. She books the service. When the two men arrive, you are there to witness the packing, to make sure it actually happens this time. Your mother sits on the deck, stares into the garden and breathes.

For you, it will feel like a purge; for your mother, surgery.

A.F.