A concept: school is over. You have passed all your finals and you come home to a loving family. You unpack all of your things your first day back and you clean your closet out just because you had the time and the motivation. You lay on your bed and sleep for a full 8 hours and wake up feeling rested and ready to tackle the day.
This is what a lot of us would surely like to have happen on our first days after getting back from school. But I’m fairly confident when I assume that this isn’t what most of us did our first days of break. It certainly isn’t what I did. As I sit here writing I’ve got half my closet to the left of me and the rest hanging out on my bed.
That’s the problem with cleaning out my closet. I shove so much stuff in there that when I only clean it out once a year I come across all this great stuff I’m too much of a hoarder to get rid of. I literally just passed off a shirt to my younger brother I got on a 6th grade field trip. I found a sweater I wore to death that used to belong to my grandma. I even discovered old stuffed animals I could still remember the names too (I was very attached to my stuffed animals). But not everything you find hidden away in your closet can give you those feel-good vibes.
Sometimes they make you angry. You come across something written into the bottom of a drawer of a dresser you got from an old friend and you see red. The flashbacks start and you remember everything. You see your first meeting, walking home from school, staying up all night on the weekends. You can feel in your heart how much you loved them and how much it hurt when they left you. You loved them with a fierceness only a young heart can manage and you felt just as fiercely broken when they broke your heart. And you feel it all over again.
Maybe something you find makes you cry. You’ll see the sleeve of a hoodie you immediately recognize as not yours and you give it a tug. You see it in the light now and you recognize it as the possession of another lost friend. You bring it up to your face and breathe in the nostalgia like a drug. You see your friendship flash before your eyes, like what they say happens when you die. You know you’re not dying, but it’s a close second. You can hear your friend offer you the hoodie and feel yourself reach over to grab hold of it, and you remember how content you felt loving your friend. The jacket slips through your fingers and easily falls to the floor. You wonder if it was that easy for them to never look back.
Because you’re a sucker for self-punishment, you decide to go through some old pictures as well. You see yourself as a kid, smiling up at the camera. You run your fingers over the edge of the picture as you recall the moment the picture was taken. Maybe your mother was behind the camera, or your father, you can’t remember exactly. What you remember most are the moments after all the pictures, when you grew up for the first time and realized how tainted your own childhood was. You feel bitterness creep into your heart and you do little to keep it out.
At this point, you’re thinking jeez, is one measly closet really worth all this emotional anguish? The pile of stuff you brought home is eyeing you in disappointment as you sit on your bed to take a breather. You literally have no idea what you’re going to do with all this new junk and going back into that closet is literally the last thing you want.
But that’s why we clean our closets right? To make room for new skeletons. Just because the memories hurt us doesn’t mean they go away, or that we should put them away. On the contrary, I think we should celebrate these memories. The things hidden away in our closets are our histories; a chronicler of our lives up to this point. Even the memories that hurt most deserve a spot on the shelf. And new memories will need a place one day too, and what a better spot than next to all your old things? And honestly, your closet probably needs a good cleaning. I know mine does.
