Spring Cleaning

With only 35 days till our glorious move, I’ve found my days becoming more and more consumed with boxes, tape, and ripped up phone book paper (Yea, I’m too cheap to buy newspaper just to crumple up and shove in a box and who the hell uses the phone book anyways? Not I. I call it being resourceful.)

As I’ve mentioned time and time again, I’m more than happy doing what most people hate (packing) because it serves as a constant reminder that our move is imminent and not just a fiction of my imagination. However, as the boxes are removed from storage and shuffled through and the contents under the bed and shoved in the corners of the closet see the light of day, I’ve realized something I’ve denied for quite some time.

I’m a pack rat.

There I said it. Although it’s kind of hard to deny when you’re pilfering through perfume boxes full of old high school graduation cards and shoe boxes of hand written notes from ages ago penned by a friend now turned mortal enemy. The mixed CDs of past exs, the wine corks of present man friend, the wrapping paper from a special present, the ticket stubs of every movie ever seen since the age of 9.

It’s getting a little out of hand.

But as I sat rereading old letters and discovering decade old Smirnoff Ice caps (yea, I was cool like that), I couldn’t help but think that the junk I’ve accumulated over the years is quite similarly paralleled to my own life.

That is to say, friendships that have been long over but no one can seem to relinquish, a size 4 figure that will inexorably never return, a maturation that moves me past silly games I’ll never play again. They’re still hanging around.

Question? (a la Dwight Shrute)

Why do we hold on to things? Why do we grasp desperately at the rapidly fraying rope of friendships past (to preserve a sense of stability and loyalty??) Why do we blindly disillusion ourselves into thinking we’ll ever look the way we did 10 years ago when in reality it’s physically impossible (to avoid tossing out the elusive skinny jeans that will never see the light of day on this ass again??) Why do we cart around board games from our elementary years that we know we’ll never play again (for sentimentalities sake??)

Whatever the reasoning (most of which are ludicrous in their very construction) I realized it was time to clean house both literally and figuratively. Time to get rid of the ghosts of the past lurking in the dark and claiming too much stake in my precious storage closets. Time to exorcise myself of the things I no longer need in my life. If I haven’t used it in a year, it’s gone. If we haven’t had a real, decent conversation in the last year, you’re out of here. If your name is not the Boo, then I don’t need your letters and gifts and shoe boxes of memories.

And I have to tell you, there’s something incredibly liberating about Spring Cleaning not only your house but also your life. A release that comes by ripping up things you once deemed important and tossing them for good. Heaving clothes and cards, games and gauchos, pens and promises out of your life and into the proverbial garbage bag. Because really, it’s called “trash” for a reason.

What junk (in your home and your life) are you holding on to??