Mountains o'things.

And so just like that I reassume my transitory, nomad life, parceling out my possessions in packing triage: urgent; secondary, but possibly necessary; not pressing at all. Diving under my little sister’s bed in the room that becomes less mine the more I sleep in it, rummaging through the hall closet, tentatively drawing out boxes and bedding stuffed on my parents’ shelves, I’ve slowly amassed my things.

I’m almost helpless when it comes to deciding what to take, what to keep and somehow find a place for at home, and what to throw out. Every item that I own has some intrinsic value apart from its nostalgic cachet, no little factor in itself. Like the archaeologist who fingers a knockoff watch in Raiders of the Lost Ark, musing that if one would “bury it in the sand for a thousand years, it becomes priceless,” so I find meaning in the smallest scrap of paper I might have scribbled a note on, in the ugliest pair of socks I might have had since fifth grade, in the scruffiest pair of shoes that ever moldered under my bed.

Sitting on my parents’ bed, surrounded by scads of stuff, I try my best to be productive. Neat piles of papers go into the Shoebox of Important Things. Cherished notebooks filled with my professors’ thoughts, textbooks that I have yet to sell, newspaper clippings carefully archived in plastic sleeves, all join the hall cupboard menagerie that, fittingly, contains some of my parents’ own college detritus.

There’s just so much. How much of this do I need, did I so easily do without the entire summer, will I ever look at or use again? What kind of insecure person am I, that I require such an enormous entourage? And how in the world can I constantly not have anything to wear?