Christmas back home was absolutely lovely. I spent my time running between my parents’ place and my brothers’ place, playing video games, reading books, and catching up with the sun. It’s been so long, oh bright ball of fire, how have I lived without you?
One of the things I did, though, was a little sad. Well, perhaps sad is precisely the right word. But I went to my storage unit and did a little spring cleaning. I dove into the dusty darkness of boxes and furniture and tried to figure out what, if anything, I haven’t missed in the year since I’ve been without it.
Now, I’m a pack-rat type of person. The way that I remember things is a little strange and I tend to connect memories and emotions to physical things around me. This means that it’s surprisingly hard for me to get rid of things sometimes.
These tendencies were stronger when I was younger and for a time I endeavored to combine them with arts and crafts to make something even more memorable. I took all the t-shirts that I hadn’t the heart to throw away and started sewing them to an old u-haul blanket, stuffing the patches as I went, with the idea of making a quilt.
Looking at the rolled bunch of fabric in the box I was faced with a bit of a conundrum. Now, I know myself well enough to know that I probably was never, ever, going to finish this project. It was going to sit unfinished and frankly a little gross in deep corners of my closet until the end times. It was taking up unnecessary space and I would be a better person if I could let it go.
But as I took it to the trash I unrolled it and sat there for a couple moments taking it in. There were memories embedded in each of the sheaths of fabric. There was a Scooby Doo shirt with Scooby and Shaggy on it that I had rescued from the DQ after our Mystery Blizzard promotion. Here was the strangely cartoonish high school mascot that had adorned my CDO PE uniform. There was a dragon cut from a shirt that I could see in my head as I stared at it, a three-quarter sleeve with an intricate green pattern that I had worn on a cruise with my Grandmother and cousins to Mexico. Here was a pink panther cut from a CDO invitational shirt, drawn by a Holly that I hadn’t thought of until that moment.
Would I remember them after I threw them away? Would these memories be gone without a physical reminder to tie them to this world?
I shut my eyes and closed the garbage can lid.