There are things we keep because we forget we have them. The last time I moved, I purged my closet, cabinets, drawers. There were things I didn’t remember keeping, didn’t remember coming into possession of. Some I kept; most I tossed to make life lighter.
There are things we keep because it’s the best of few options. I had a vacuum for awhile that was old and worked at 15% power (this was my very scientific estimate). I know that it gathered very few things embedded in the carpet. My choice was to get rid of it and have no vacuum or get a new one, which I really couldn’t afford to do. So I kept it, because it was the best I had at the time. (Shout out to my dad for the vacuum as a graduation present.)
There are things we keep because we love them. All the notebooks I’ve kept with stories and journals entries since I was 13, stored in a box that barely fits them. Earrings that were my moms. A stuffed owl from Keith. My car – even though she is nearing 9 and has 175,000 miles on her, Cory Corolla and I have had some mad adventures and I love and respect her.
There are things we keep because we don’t know how to get rid of them.
I keep my grief close to me because it keeps me close to what was before. I will never be the girl from before – there will always be a clear, direct, cracked line between Marianne, the girl who went to pick her brother up from baseball, and Marianne, the girl who walked in through the laundry room shortly thereafter to find out her mom had died. They are two different people who led two different lives. There were never any instructions on how to grieve, simply just a lot of moving forward, trying to get into whatever the next day was, the next month, the next year. And so, in a way, my grief keeps me connected to the life before. I cannot completely discard it because then I feel like I will be casting off everything prior to six years ago. I know this isn’t true, but it feels so very true sometimes.
There are things we never even thought to get rid of.
My bed frame broke this weekend. My bed is ten years old and the frame has cracked and broken about four or five times. It has been glued and screwed and nailed back together and I’ve continued to use it. Just a few days ago, it broke again. There’s no warning. I don’t have to be jumping on it or thrashing around mid-nightmare; I can look at it in a way it doesn’t appreciate, sit down, set a laundry basket on it, and it will decide to give way. So it broke again last week and Keith and I went through the tedium of moving the mattress and box spring and disconnecting the headboard and footboard from the frame and putting everything on the floor, like it was time for a slumber party in the living room. When I asked Keith when he’d be able to fix it, I realize maybe I didn’t want him to. I never would have thought to take my bed off of the frame had it not broken, but it’s easier this way, and I like the simplicity of it.
“Can I really throw this frame away? The footboard and everything?” I asked Keith.
“You can do whatever you want,” he told me.
I am 25, but was still thinking that I had to keep things the way they were, the way they’d been; in this case, sleeping in a bed that my parents had bought me ten years ago that had survived 4 moves, thousands of nights of sleep.
It looks like this now. I figure I’ll keep the headboard for awhile to store stuff behind and do some kind of alternative headboard when I move into a place more permanent.
note the cat and the narwhal pillowcase.
Nearby are the pieces I haven’t managed to haul out yet.
It is still interesting to see my life as mine. There moments of “My bed broke” really mean “I get to do something new.”
Like with grief, I am sometimes afraid to get rid of anything; it doesn’t cross my mind to cut things out of my life, because I might lose what they represent, what they are connected to. Sometimes it takes me a long time and I have to find it by accident. But it doesn’t always hurt. Sometimes it surprises me.
