In which Krissy upsets herself

I started to clean my room today. When this occurs, it is not generally prompted by my mother's requests. Nor is it prompted by her threats ("No Martha Stewart magazine until your room is clean!"). Rather, it occurs only when I have the desperate need or want to find something long buried by piles of clothes or hidden in shoeboxes of random junk.

Today I remembered something, and realized how sorry I was to have forgotten it.

Wasting time on facebook, I began to think about (naturally) my friends. I started to miss them, like I always do, and I began to reminisce about last year, before moving to Maryland. Then I started thinking about my going-away party, and then I started thinking about the going-away gifts, cards, and letters I received. I suddenly had the urge to find them, to sit and reread what had been written.

And so my search began. I started with the bin I keep pictures in, and began removing albums and loose photographs. First I unearthed my Damn Yankees phone tree, then my G.I. medals. I hadn't found what I was looking for, but I was on to something else. I continued my search elsewhere, in shoeboxes, folders, and bins. Now I was looking for not only going-away letters, but, reminded of G.I. and my various E.R. and hospital visits, for get-well cards and pictures, and perhaps most importantly, a set of notes written on Hilton notepaper that I received at G.I. state finals last year. I thought about this more and more, about how I had almost missed it because of collapsing, how my mother drove me down by myself because I missed the bus for a doctor's appointment, and how, upon my arrival in Springfield, I was greeted so warmly by my friends. Sometime that weekend, several of my friends gave me notes or drew me pictures (a certain someone surprised me with fruit snacks). I kept those notes, and put them on my bulletin board when I got home. I remembered now how I had packed them, along with everything else pinned on that piece of cork, and everything else inside my room, in an assortment of boxes and bins one week last June. And now, digging in my closet in Maryland, I wanted to find those notes.

I can't exactly explain why I wanted to find them so badly, aside from sentimentality. All I know is that I tore through dozens of still-unpacked boxes that are housed in the back of my closet, under my bed, and stacked in corners of my room. I dug, frantically, through every receptacle that had even the slightest possibility of containing that for which I searched. At the end of all this, I sat.

In the middle of the floor, surrounded by throw pillows, unironed slacks, human Geography papers and more, I began to cry. I couldn't find them. I had come across some letters sent by friends after I moved, and read over them fondly, but they weren't what I needed to find. Wiping away my seemingly unnecessary tears, I began to understand why I needed to find the particular notes that I did. It was because if couldn't find them, every scrap of paper and photograph and unremarkable object that I had ever saved and placed inside a shoebox was random junk. If I couldn't find them, it meant that somewhere along the line of packing and moving and unpacking, I threw them away. I discarded something meaningful, irreplaceable, and truly valuable. I left myself only with random junk.

The phrase "random junk" is significant, because you see, I used to think of my shoebox stuff as "homeless mementos". I would occasionally keep something given to me by a friend, or made by a younger cousin, and stow it away in one of these boxes, because I had no other place to put it. But all of this time, I believed that I cared about my shoebox stuff. I believed that I kept it for a reason. Upon the realization that I had disposed of such wonderful gifts from friends, I could no longer continue thinking that kept that which was important or meaningful. At whatever point I started "cleaning out" my boxes to save space (or whatever reason I had at the time), I turned my homeless mementos into random junk.

I'm still looking, in binders and drawers and folders, for those couple of notes. I'm quite sure that they're gone, because I've searched everywhere I can remember packing that sort of thing. Because sifting through my memories like I have today has made me want to read them. More than that though, it has made me want to prove to myself that I was not so foolish as to cast off a crumpled letter, and to keep only what was framed or purchased.