Moving sucks. There's just no other way to describe the existential dread that accompanies the purging and packing of one's life to continue on in a new environment. And I hate packing most of all.
One of the things I love/hate most about moving is sorting through all the personal trinkets I've collected along the way. What do I keep? What do I toss? Remember that person? Where did I get this from? And OH, THE MEMORIES...
I came across a box today. I've kept this box with me everywhere I've lived for the last 23 years. It contains every scrap of paper, every carefully folded page, every passed note, every postmarked letter I received between 1993 and 1997, my years in high school.
It all started when I came home from school one day and needed to empty my backpack of all the crap that had accumulated in the bottom to make room for the books that I could no longer cram into it. I looked at all the funny things my friends and I shared in nonsensical scribbles and decided to just dump it into a box and sort it for the important bits at a later date. Soon, it grew into a challenge to myself. "Keep this for yourself. Every scrap. Every dramatic interlude. Every stupid joke. Every crush. Everything. Even the bad poetry. Keep it all. Keep it until you're old and married and have kids. Keep it as a window to your youth, because you will lose touch with that person and that person is pretty rad. You'll want to remember her exactly as she was. Just you wait and see."
Over the years, other things have been dumped in there as well. Cards, trinkets, all kinds of things got tossed into this weird time capsule I made. Unfortunately, this caused a problem. Candies left in envelopes had melted layers of pages into a sticky mess on the bottom. So today, I cleaned the box and discarded all that could not be salvaged.
As I dug through the overwhelming stack of paper, I was flooded with memories. It was fun at first, then bittersweet, then entirely overwhelming. It took me over an hour and I certainly did not look at even half of the pages, but the job is done. I was able to salvage most of what was there, purge a bit that no longer needed saving, and secure what remained in a new container. I'm relieved that so much will be safe for a few more years.
As I sifted, I found Christmas cards from my grandmothers, both of whom were very dear to me and died years ago; their soft cursive felt warm in my heart. I found silly notes, passed out of sheer boredom between myself and some of the best friends I will ever know. I found parts of me that I had forgotten, memories that had all but faded. I saw how deeply I loved and how painfully I lost. I savored all of it, like a familiar smell that reminds you of home.
I wonder if anyone still passes notes in class. We used to fold them so elaborately and hand them off under desks and between classes. There was a tension when someone didn't write back right away, questions left unanswered. "Are you coming over tonight to hang out?" "Who's your crush?" "What did he/she say about xyz?" "Do you think he/she likes me?" "I'm bored. What are you doing?" Pages upon pages of anything besides actual schoolwork.
I hope note-writing isn't a dead art. I hope it's not just texting and Snapchat. I hope these generations still have stupid, hilarious conversations like we did, penned on real paper, so some ridiculous, sentimental fool like myself can look back 23 years from now and think, "Huh. I actually was pretty rad all those years ago. And maybe life wasn't simpler then, but we sure knew how to live."
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