[a young packrat], or, "WHAT YOU NEED TO REMEMBER"

I am the most delibrately packratty young person I know. The "young" part is there because when I think "packrat," I always think of an old cat lady type with lace doilies all over her house for some reason and a basement and attic and cellar and whatever storage rooms and other rooms that aren't supposed to be storage rooms but serve as storage rooms full of useless, meaningful knickknacks she can't throw away ever. That's pretty much me except for the old part and the house part because I don't own my own house and if I tried to fulfill my packratty inclinations to their fullest packratty extents right now, anywhere outside the boundary of my room, my mama would go crazy and throw me right out.

Whether it's ticket stubs or pictures or bottle caps or just little cute things that don't actually mean anything significant, I stash and keep and forget until I unearth it years later and reminisce. Maybe it's because I have such a bad memory -- I feel like I have to stash souvenirs to remind me of the special days and the not so special days. Or maybe it's because I've moved so much? It's made me more aware of everything-in-flux and how, if you don't hold onto the grounding grips of your rockclimbing life metaphor, the memories of even the most precious days and nights can slip away in the fast currents of everythingelse. So I stash. And I forget. And I wait for those Memory Lane Days [or Nights] when I will dig through the piles of meaningless, meaningful mementos and match each thing with a corresponding memory in the brain troves, hold the preciousness to my cheek and breathe in its scent of old with a splash of reminiscent.

-------------^unearthed from the Draft archives, from January 2011-------------

But all of this is strangely appropriate, three and a third years later, as I watch fourth years and first years alike move out of their apartments and their dorms, end-of-semester goodbyes and beginning-of-summer hellos abounding. For some it's the first, for others, the very last, Moving Out. Scraping and scrapping the last bits of this past year's life, full of memories and inescapable dust bunnies, along with unearthed memories and forgettables, too. And it's all goodbye goodbye goodbye, feeling like no one's ever gone this way down Forever Avenue before, no one's ever felt this way, so bittersweet, before, but deep down, knowing that we're all a part of this eternal cycle of beginnings and endings and all their convergences. Just as old blogpost drafts resurface into your life at the perfectly three-years-later moment, and wsj articles that have been sitting on your floor for the past three weeks catch your eye, all like "WHAT YOU NEED TO REMEMBER" and perfectly grabbing your three-weeks-later attention.