I wrote this first part, mostly, on the
last night of my Spring Break, which was 123 days ago. Also, there are now websites whose whole job it is to tell you how many days it's been since something. There might be a part II
coming in nearer days, if we’re lucky. If we’re not… you can assume Part II =
I moved on to more consequential activities.
That said: this is not important. It's a thing that is just long-winded thoughts, not really a story or anything. It's not a philosophical reflection or exploration of privilege or discussion of hoarding. It's just... a phenomenon that tends to occur when I resolve to make a lot of decisions in a row about accumulated things.
Spoiler alert: I
kept the phone.
Every time I do
a major “clean out” I hit this exact spot, which for quick reference, we’ll
call The Bog, about 75% of the way through. It surprises me and dismays me
every time. I don’t mean like cleaning out a drawer or weeding through the
pantry. I mean a Reckoning. I’ve embarked on a few of these in my life. This
spring break was supposed to be one of them. It was supposed to be a legendary
one. I’d been foretelling of it for months, prophesying of its comprehensiveness and swearing
that I would not rest until it was complete. And now spring break is a few
hours from ending. Rudely. Once I enter regulation weekend territory, it’s not
technically spring break anymore. It’s the weekend. So. We have a few hours. And I’m sitting in the Bog.
The Bog involves
a lot of sitting in the middle of disheveled piles and a lot of thinking about how
ridiculous and frustrating it is that I have piles and what they mean, etc. At my
childhood house, before I left for college, I sat perched on a stool in the
bullseye of the upheaval, twirling my hair for days. Perhaps the reflections got channeled into some blogging, if
we’re talking circa 2004 or later. Otherwise it was an email to Rachelle,
probably several chapters long.
My mindset in
The Bog is still the same as it was going in to the Reckoning; pare down. Minimize
so I can breathe again. And up until this point, it goes swimmingly. The
donation piles grow rapidly. Boxes are brought to light for the first time in years
and several moves, their contents efficiently and quickly reallocated to Trash
or No Longer Keep. I scoff at my hoarding tendencies and grossly
underestimate the remainder of the task.
Then suddenly
there’s the telephone Papaw gave me. It’s not particularly special. He gave me
several things he’d find around if he thought it might interest me. The phone is one of many and I haven't even seen it since 2011. But it’s from
him. To me. Will I ever use a landline again? Unlikely. But I will also never sit
on the floor in Papaw’s living room again and wait as he goes down to his workbench to
grab the phones he found (where? a garage sale? an auction box of random things?),
which he will distribute to my brother and me, and on which I will conduct a
large percentage of my middle school/high school phone conversations. And all of the sudden, no matter how much I want to get rid of the majority of the stuff I don't use or need, I can't make a single decision.
It’s not even
that this phone is the most special or only remaining thing I have from him.
Not at all. I have far more important artifacts from Papaw. But this phone has just
become the snag in the entire process, and it’s sitting right next to me as I
type. After the phone (or the initial Snag Object, whatever it may be), every
following thing gets heavier, the choices more impossible. So many things
become links to a person who has meant something to me. It doesn’t even matter
if this person is living or not, or living at a great distance or right
downstairs working on his computer. The importance of these links grows
exponentially, once discovered in the Bog.
So then I sit in the Bog with the phone. And the camera bag. And the notebooks full of
organic chemistry and a postcard from my brother. The figurine of a girl
holding a duck I haven’t seen in 15 years. The _____ (solve for x).
x = relic from (person I love) ^ every memory/fondness I have
of (person I love)
There’s also the
evidence, which I usually don’t even mean to keep, but it’s the seaweed and
detritus that comes with the flow of time and gets caught in the branches of
the rest of it, and when I run across it, it catches me in my tracks and then
here I am trying to figure out if I should throw out a crinkled bit of paper or
a wrapper or something. The unimportant
but tangible bits that serve as evidence of the days
in between those that are documented or photographed. Not important but now very weighty.
Evidence like receipts for a
hundred Roommate dates at Pei Wei or a bike run to Elephant Café, or for “cocaine chips” and from when I thought a can of Pringles = a good dinner. The cellphone, which reminds me that this is the phone I had when I called people
to tell them Jeremy proposed, or the one I used before texting was really a
thing. Books of checks from accounts
that don’t exist anymore, for a name I don’t have anymore, for an address where
I don’t live anymore.
Granted, some of
these things are obviously easy to part with, especially when I’m at the
beginning of a Reckoning. I respond to them like a rational person and toss
them and carry on.
But then I hit
this point. And the piles surround me, physically, and I feel claustrophobic
in the evidence. I am sitting in my empty workspace in the middle and I
sit suspended in the years, getting nothing accomplished as an embarrassing amount of time passes, and I cannot make a single decision without shouldering a very long contemplation about one hundred different things. All spurred by a Sonic receipt Meredith probably stuck to my dashboard on our way to see Rent for the 4th (and not final) time.
That’s where I
am now. Incapacitated. Exhausted from doing something I am terrible at even in the most benign situations; decision making has never been my forte. And 90% of the chaos that surrounds me is valueless trash, not even
donatable. Things I haven’t missed, haven’t known I had. But now I have to think and reflect, ad nauseam.
And if I donate the
phone, it’s unlikely I’ll ever wish I hadn’t. My memory of Papaw won’t be
diminished. But.
