On moving out
alternative title: the week I found out that I’m a real-life hoarder
I have so many things.
There were many items in my room I had completely forgotten about, and even more things I had accumulated over the year.
There was a pinecone from my friend Kevin, five pairs of career fair sunglasses, my orientation t-shirt, a “Baker House Baker Home” baseball cap, a moldy lemon, an empty pepperoni stick container, a Pokerbots backpack, a letter written in marker from my little sister, and a cardboard box of files, just to name a few.
I tried as much as I could to throw out the things that I wasn’t going to use, but it was way more difficult than I expected.
One of the items was a NVIDIA graphics card that was many years out of date. At the start of the year, I had gone to a Trash2Treasure event after receiving an email that I could get free™️ stuff. I picked up the graphics card. I had tried to justify it to myself that it was because I did dEeP lEaRnINg and I would use it for my research, but the actual reason was definitely just because it looked cool. I didn’t throw it out.
Another thing that I found that I hadn’t thought about in a while was a volleyball that I had written on back in September. I had made a “truth or dare” ball with questions I wanted to ask other people and fun dares we could do. “What do you wish you had done in the past year?” was one. “Eat a spoonful of whatever another person tells you” was another. I had never actually used it throughout the year, because I figured as a freshman, I wasn’t a person who was allowed to make people do things. That volleyball was another thing that I knew I was going to keep for the fall.
It was an oddly, or at least unexpectedly, sad experience moving out of the room. The entire year, I had complained about the location of my room (it was the third-farthest from the entrance). But when it came time to move out, I didn’t want to. Something that I had built a significant part of my identity upon was disappearing, leaving with every box I took out of the room.
I’ve donated some things, thrown others out, and plan to take some home to Seattle in the middle of summer. However, I still have too many things.
Unused:
Something that I had built part of my identity upon was slowly disappearing, leaving slowly with every box I took out of the room.
Shortly after I left, a pang of loneliness hit me. “I want to go home,” I thought. I had no idea where home was, between my home back in Seattle, my old room, my summer home, and my room in the fall. There were a multitude of places I could consider mine, but none that resonated as places that would reduce the feeling of displacement I had.
At the end of the year, I tried to convince myself to throw it away, especially because it was pretty heavy. At that point, though, I enjoyed it for the sake of the memory too much and had to keep it.