Detritus of Time

Today I started sorting out my old room. This proved to be a mammoth task, largely because I hadn’t really cleaned it in about 10 years. Now this isn’t to say that my room was really messy. It had some semblance of order, except that amid the piles of books were old high school merit certificates, college dorm pictures and even a junior high yearbook. Ah, the memories. When I found amongst the bric-a-brac a picture of myself when I was in kindergarten I thought, “when did I become old?” This is no doubt a common thought but a scary one nonetheless. I’m only 22 goddamit. Already I’ve got enough memories and knickknacks to fill a large corner of the basement. The basement is of course the place where my family stores all the detritus of time. There one finds memories of a past that was close to being good but didn’t quite live up to expectations. I took a look around there as I placed my old belongings in storage. I could see my engineering books next to my fathers and I wondered how I ended up in his shoes. That however is a long story that needs many more entries to explain. I also saw my old school drawings, most weird and some inspired. Old tests that I’d aced were also abundant (I was so smart). Indeed all I have to show for myself as a human being is in that basement. It’s a sad thought. Sad and troubling to be complete. I feel so connected to this past that I can’t bear to throw it away. I need to know that some part of me will always exist in that basement. But as my family and I grow older, our pasts take up more and more space, becoming horribly unorganized. We are in desperate need of a family museum or at least a warehouse. The clutter of the basement oppresses us. It hangs over our heads, a reminder of our failure to control our lives, to control even our belongings. Old luggage, bicycles, pictures, my grandparent’s furniture, generations of crap lay all around. O God, let it all burn and set us free.