Cleaning House

In a spurt of ambition and "if not now, when?" Dan and I spent the majority of Saturday going through boxes. All the boxes were culled from all the corners of the house. Full boxes, empty boxes, boxes within boxes, the half full boxes, all loaded into our living room. I am never as ready as I "ought" to be to sort or throw, so Dan was particularly helpful in this matter. He created systems. Went through his pittance of boxes and helped sort the neutral things around the edges while I waded through the waters of memory and trinkets. Ever reassuring "We can have a box for things you don't know what to do with yet..." I made good progress. Boxes were combined. Bags thrown away. Until I hit the box I was dreading.

A beat up, taped shut shoe box. Black lid, white base. Full of every note, letter, postcard I'd managed to keep from Junior High on. My nemesis box. Every time I've tried to throw things away, or sort things out I've left the box as it is. I haven't been sure what to do with it. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's because the relationships held in those notes have so utterly deteriorated since my freshman year that it's like they never happened if it wasn't for this proof. Maybe I was hoping by holding onto them somehow a thread between that group of friends would still remain. But like any talisman this box began to possess me, instead of the other way around. I couldn't throw it away, the small squares of tucked and folded paper had become greater than the sum of their parts.

So I decided to read them. One last time. And then throw them away. I think I began reading through them searching to figure out what went wrong. A truly frustrating goal due to, like any 8th grader, we didn't date any notes. And in scouring the words and sentences I realized it was a pointless endeavor. I stopped looking for a reason. I skimmed a few more. And I saved a few pieces I wanted to keep. The Clique contract we drafted for a week in the 8th grade. A few notes back and forth about religion. Some mix tapes. My entire senior letter folio. My first love poem. Our "Shower Stories" we had written each other. The rest got tossed and taken out to be recycled.

There is no blame to be found in people growing apart. If I had really wanted to find blame I could have found it. Divergent interests (sedentary versus athletic), non-simultaneous emotional funks that pulled the group apart, me diving headlong into my Evangelical faith not yet willing to question or examine what I was choosing to belong to. But really, who is to blame. Why is it that today I can let go of friendships that have served their place and time, yet I was holding so tightly onto these? They still existed. We still mattered to each other. It all still happened. Those experiences still formed me into who I am today.

A couple of the notes referred to keeping them, reading them again in 10 or 12 years. Laughing at what we were going through. And there I was. Doing just that. And I couldn't help but laugh at the irony and then want to cry at the reality. I don't make it a practice to live in the past, and I didn't appreciate the vestige of friendships past having such a hold on me. So I cleaned house. Said goodbye to the ghosts. Kept what was important and moved on. This life is too full, too beautiful and colorful for me to be blinded by the past.