5/21/10

Small Coughs of Dust

In a further fit of self-improvement, I've also been attempting to clean the apartment, our humble abode. Somewhere down the line, I let life pile up in various areas of the place, and all that life is covered with dust. I'll be honest, life becomes bleak when you let it pile up with gray dirt. And that bleakness makes way for further lack of ambition. I know our couch is clear, our bed is clear, and the kitchen is as good as it gets, but to some extent, the apartment isn't livable as it stands. The walk-in closet in the living room was not very walk-in. My desk was not usable as a desk. Our coffee table has no room for a cup of coffee and barely functions as a table. It goes on, but honestly I find it amusing that as you let stuff pile up higher and higher, furniture ceases to function as it's intended and instead becomes a shelf. I feel up to my ears in shelves, and until recently, I wasn't doing much about it.

If you watch a show like Hoarders, the common answer to the question of how things got so bad is a befuddled "I don't know." If you ask when, you get the same answer. I am feeling a bit of that "I don't know" right now. However, that's a knee-jerk response. If I had to think about it, I could name a few occasions of where giving a fuck stopped being an option. A home reflects its residents, and our apartment was beginning to represent people who weren't trying, maybe one person more so than the other. I'll be honest, with how down I had become about my body and various other aspects of my situation, I couldn't help but stare at my pile of unopened mail and think, "Why?" No one said anything. I'm just responding to that tiny screaming voice inside me attempting to compel me to open the mail and do something with it. The doing is another halting block, though. As long as I don't open the mail, I won't have to read it. If I don't read it, I won't have to throw it away or shred it or respond to it or call someone. There's never just one decision to be made, and I guess I haven't been in a decision-making mood until lately.

On May 7th, by some unknown force, I decided to take care of that walk-in closet in the living room. Scratch that. I know the force. The Monday prior, we had to empty the closet so Verizon could some and install their FiOS technology through the crawlspace down there. For the bulk of the week, then, Francesco and I lived in Box Town, population: 2. Five of those boxes, set in the dining room, were mine, and they were all relatively heavy with stuff. I moved into the apartment with all this stuff, mind you. The biggest box, easily twice as big as any of the others, was really staring me in the face. It stared me in the face when I wasn't even at home. I couldn't help wondering, "What the hell do I have in there?" The answer, my friends, is junk. All the boxes were full of junk. Junk, as I'm using it here, can stand for useful items, useless items, nostalgia, photos, birthday cards, notebooks, poems, artwork, art supplies, and other past-life viscera that I clearly have not looked at or needed for over two years.

Emptying this box was certainly a journey and one I was having on my own. Francesco was otherwise occupied with The Real Housewives of New Jersey, and plus, I could not expect him to tell me what to do with my own stuff, not at this point at least. Thus, I don't mean to imply I needed or wanted his help, but rather that you can't help but feel very solitary doing this kind of thing. You're perusing your own life as it is kept in a box, and no one can really treat the items with the same regard or disdain as you. I won't say that I laughed or cried, but I definitely felt something. Though in the end, I realized those somethings I felt only lasted as long as the item was within view. For two and a half years, I clearly wasn't missing anything in this box. I wasn't feeling any longing for the photos, any purpose for the art supplies, any need at all for any of it. In fact, my ignorance towards the contents of the box should stand as a testament to how little all of it really meant to me. And there were four more boxes!

I don't need to go over every item, but I'll let you know that I threw out and recycled so much stuff and all with relative ease. The "hardest" things to throw out (if you'd call it that) were the photos, of course, because those are visual depictions of memories, ones whose images I could not muster to save my own life. Letting go of an image in time can be scary, I'll be honest, but at the same time, I have not forgotten that the situations behind these photos have ever occurred. One day, I will forget, but maybe even that means something about their relevance in my life now. Ten years ago, I ate in a restaurant with a purple-haired guy named Nick, and I had stolen a sign off the Boston Red Line before dinner. Where does that fit in my current life? I don't even know Nick's last name or what he's doing nowadays. Five paper bags of paper and notebooks, one garbage bag full of useless wires and chargers, and one garbage bag full of plastic trinkets later, and I was down to just the one biggest box. It's not even full. The biggest question now is why did I move with all that crap? I did a big clean of my bedroom before I moved out, and yet these things were absolute musts going forward.

Skip forward to yesterday's project of cleaning off my desk. There were significantly less challenges here except for the dust, the goddamn dust. It was really like all I ever did with that desk was put things on it and never take them off. At the very least, I wanted to get some Pledge down on the wood. As awesomely efficient as a Swiffer duster is at cleaning up dust, it can't prevent all of it from entering the air again or more importantly, from entering my nose. Rather than being surrounded in nostalgia, I was mostly engulfed in a cloud of permanent dust swirling around my head. There was dust in the boxes, don't get me wrong, but they could not match the bunny-attracting power of my desk. Nevertheless, I got rid of a slew of junk including CDs containing drivers for hardware I don't own anymore and cardboard boxes for games which didn't need to be kept separate from the games I had in sleeves. Again, I moved with those boxes, and I do recall getting rid of a slew of game boxes before I moved, but I'm talking about the big kind. You know, the ones that were easily ten times the size of the CD case inside and had some labyrinthine cardboard structure inside to keep the case in the same center of gravity. So yesterday, I got rid of a lot of the smaller kind where I could. Some of them were simple sleeves for equivalently sized DVD boxes.

The feeling of isolation yesterday was mostly exacerbated by the fact that poker night was happening in the dining room, but I was okay. As I said, there was a lot less nostalgia going on at my desk. Next up is the coffee table which is full of the previously mentioned unopened mail. The only nostalgia there will be me crying over the ability to see the grain of the wood on the table.

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