Recently, Michael and I bought our first house. There are lots of things to reflect on when it comes to moving out and moving in, but I want to talk about just one for now: the opportunity to take stock of all the memorabilia that I've accumulated over the past 15 years or so. In the typical course of events, the stuff I've decided I want to keeps gets tossed into a shoebox or suchlike, which then gets tossed into a larger box when it starts to overflow, and so on. I don't look at any of this stuff very often, maybe every few years or so, and then I put it back in its place when I'm done. But this time, the goal was to try to free up some room, to get rid of some of the (physical and metaphorical) weight I've been carrying around.
And so, on a not-particularly-special Saturday in November, I opened up all the boxes and spread out all of their contents and took stock.
The first thing that struck me was how powerfully everything in those boxes brought up memories, although the things that I saved weren't serving quite the purpose that I had intended them to. Things that had meant a lot to me at the time don't mean nearly as much now, but things that were random and meaningless at the time have suddenly taken on a great deal of meaning with age. The flowers I got from my first boyfriend on my birthday, which I'd dried and labeled and tucked reverentially into a tiny box to preserve them, suddenly seemed absurd and small. The printout of an email that I'd sent to my brother, which at the time was merely a backup record, was now a fascinating window into the way I thought about the world when I was sixteen. These reversals were ubiquitous.
Then I was struck by the sheer extent and variety of the things that I had saved. They were little things, mostly: a record of my high school homework assignments, or an address book with the phone numbers of my classmates from sixth grade; stacks of Playbill covers from Broadway shows I've seen, or a battered map of my college campus; the high school literary magazine that I edited, or the t-shirt from my summer trip to Israel. Bits and pieces that friends have sent me from their vacations; pretty junk from the far side of the world. Photographs by the thousands. Every one of these things looks up at me with questions: Remember this? Remember them? Remember that time? All of this might have blown away like smoke on the wind but for these little reminders: I knew these people, I visited these places, I saw these things. Postcards from the past, each a little enigma: What is it? Where is it from? When did it happen? How? Each question only begets more questions: Why did I keep this? Did I really think I would want to see it someday? And, inevitably: Why didn't I keep that? Didn't I realize that I would want to see it someday?
Here's the truly puzzling part: If all of this stuff disappeared, overnight, I wouldn't miss it. I wouldn't wake up five or ten years from now desperately wanting to read the program from my freshman year convocation, or worrying that some fundamental part of my identity has been lost because I no longer have those Kerry/Edwards bumper stickers. Okay, some of it I would miss --- I want to still have the wedding album in twenty years, and (at least some of) the photos are irreplaceable. But the rest of it? Did I need it then? Do I need it now?
No and no. I kept things simply because I could, because I thought I might want to see them someday, because it was too painful at the time to contemplate throwing them away. Maybe there's something I can hope to learn from these piles about myself or the human condition or growing up at the turn of the second millennium, but I doubt it. Because all of the things that I did preserve serve mostly to remind me powerfully of all of the things that I didn't, or couldn't: crying jags, screaming matches on the phone, sweet stolen kisses, anxious days filled with longing, nights filled with stars. Those are the things that really shaped me. Those are the memories that I would miss in five or ten years if I lost them. These scraps of paper and cloth are just pale shadows of the actual events. They aren't really a record of what happened. They're really a record of who I was. I saved the things I did because they meant something to me at the time. But they don't anymore, because I'm not that person anymore. I can know who I am, and who I was, without the shoeboxes and the memorabilia they contain. So I can let them go.
But then why did I keep these things at all? Just for this tender nostalgic feeling I get when looking through them? For the reminders of who I used to be, how far I've come, and how far I still have to go? Because some things accrue meaning not because of what they are, but because of how long they have been kept?
Maybe I can try to answer those questions, at least in part, by looking at the difference between then and now. I've collected so much less as I've gotten older. The meticulously kept detritus of my day-to-day life that I once kept so carefully now is consigned to the trash bin: movie ticket stubs, boarding passes, birthday cards. Why? Why do I keep less and less as the years go by? Is it because most of the things I do and feel for are kept digitally, freed from the burden of the paper trail? I'm tempted by this simple explanation, and it may be partially right, but I think there's something more.
Maybe it's because the older I get, the more I recognize the futility of trying to create some semblance of who I am out of what I have. Or maybe it's because I genuinely did feel more, and more passionately, as a younger woman and a girl, imbuing the things in my life with more meaning. It makes me a little sad that I've let go of that intensity of feeling. But with that letting-go has come the humbling and strengthening recognition that any single moment no longer has the overwhelming power to break my spirit or derail my life. The world is still full of wonders, whether they come with little keepsakes or not. It's the memories that matter. And recognizing that, in some small way, is what it truly means to grow up.
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