Friday 17 February 2012

detritus

As I go through the boxes in the garage of stuff I had carefully stored there for the past four and a half years, and lugged around with me from rental place to rental place for years before that, I wonder...why?

It's kind of a grim process, sifting through the material remnants of my life and finding I don't want to keep any of it.

If I ever become a famous author, I'm sure future archivists will weep at the thought of all the juvenilia I've just thrown in the recycling, but I can't even bear to re-read it. Out it goes.

I open a box of CDs. CDs! (will the current generation have less stuff to cart around because more of it is digitally stored, I wonder?) Each album reminds me of a time or a person...many of them I don't even care to recall, and yet I have carried these CDs with me. I don't want them anymore but I don't want to get rid of them...and yet if someone came and took them all away, I would be none the less for it.

Boxes of scripts from university plays. T-shirts and programmes from those shows. My old year 12 shirt, signed and scribbled and defaced by my classmates.

Much of it is in the bin. Some stuff will go to Vinnies. Some will be spread out on our driveway on Saturday at our garage sale, hoping to find another home.

And none of it will be coming with us.

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