Hi!

How’s the world?

I spent the morning packing my college apartment into boxes and deciding what to finally let go of. I also impulsively cut some old jeans into shorts, day dreamed about graduate school, and made curry. This is what it felt like.

THE MEMORIES THAT CLOTHES CARRY

I started the day by taking a pair of scissors to an old pair of jeans which, mind you, never seems to turn out. But they’re pretty chic, I’m not going to lie. And, in a way, they served as a microcosm of the trimming away and letting go that would consume the morning.

It’s funny how we can have things hidden under our beds for months and not think about them once, but when it comes down to whether or not to keep them, we feel some strange desire to hold on. I’ve held onto a lot of things for a long time now. Living in my hometown has allowed for that. It has kept me close to everything that has ever happened to me. But the next time that I move it will be across the country and there are some things that I just don’t want to come with me. Things that it felt alright to keep for college, for these murky years of not quite full adulthood, but that when I look at now, I can’t bear the memory of anymore.

Like the long, flowing, maroon dress that I wore all of the time around my first boyfriend. I remember standing bare foot on his roof one night as a warm spring breeze billowed through that dress. He was attempting to play guitar and I was staring out at the city as it slowly twinkled to life. I felt very young and very beautiful in that dress. But it was also the one that I was wearing when I said goodbye to him for the last time on that hot June day when it was hard enough to breathe without my heart breaking. It was the ruby fabric of that dress that pooled around me as I fell to my knees in tears. It got heartbreak all over it and that’s a stain that you just can’t ever scrub out. But I’ve kept it. I’ve kept it all of these years in the back of my closet because each time that I held it, I felt as if I were holding both innocence and the death of it. It felt like proof that those stupidly sweet afternoons happened, that they were real. That I was real. I suppose I was afraid that getting rid of it would be like getting rid of what happened. Or more truly, like getting rid of the girl that I was then.

LETTING GO

And I still felt something of that as I held that dress up today. Just like I did as I lifted out the checkered pants that I adored at sixteen and all of my old track and field shirts and that one tank top that I thought if I held onto for long enough, I would be able to wear without also wearing the memory of the night I spilled that god-awful peppermint schnapps on it with my best friend before she moved away. But they all felt so heavy in my hands. Their fabric was drenched in the past and stained with who I used to be. They would never not feel like sixteen, seventeen, that one awful date or the night I drank too much with my first college roommates. And I just can’t carry all of that anymore. I can’t keep the ghosts of every life I have ever lived hanging in my closet anymore. I was always so afraid that if I got rid of them, that I might have nothing left to remember who I was by. Or that I might want them back one day. That I might miss them. Isn’t that what we tell ourselves? But the dresses and shirts and hats are not the things that I was ever really afraid of letting go of. They just represent what I have already left behind. It’s not the fabric that I want to hold onto. It’s the warm evening air that billowed through it on that spring night. It’s the innocence and sweetness and naiveté that was falling through my fingers faster than I could know it. And those are things that are never coming back. They are things that a cotton dress is far to flimsy to retain. I understood that today.

So I put that dress in the donation pile. And then I put it back in the keep. And then, back in the donation. I did this with most things. In fact, even when I tied the bag up and walked out into the hallway with it and pressed the elevator button, I found myself going back once more because, after much internal debate, I had left a little floral top in the keep pile that I just needed to get rid of with a fervor that has never come over me before. I couldn’t keep even that one floral ghost anymore. I just couldn’t. I went back, unlocked my door, and added it to the donation bunch.

I loaded up my trunk with the several bags and drove away, feeling oddly close yet so far away from the day that I had loaded that same trunk up with things to take to college with me. I also totally looked in the rear view mirror in that super profound way that they do in the movies, watching my apartment building grow smaller and smaller in the distance as Green Day’s “Good Riddance” invariably blasted my speakers. So dramatic. It’s even funnier when you consider that I still have six more months until I actually finish college. It’s not even the end and I’m already blasting Green Day.

DREAMING OF GRAD SCHOOL

Speaking of the end, the reality of this fall being my last semester is hitting me. As much as I loathe the party scene of undergrad and cannot wait to never see another red solo cup or bikini bottom littering the street on my way to class, the thought of being done with school is heart-wrenching. Most people that I talk to can’t wait. They hope to just make it to the end and never have to set foot in a classroom again. But I don’t think I want it to end yet. I don’t think I’m ready to never have another intellectual debate with a professor again or get to write a research paper that ends up changing my worldview in a dozen, diagonal ways. So, I’ve been researching graduate programs in New York. The thought of traipsing through some ancient lecture hall in a black turtleneck with Zadie Smith and Sylvia Plath in my bag as October leaves litter the street is just too good.

I told myself that this would be a simple post. That I would just share what I did today. But this is what I did today. I let go of old things. It happened to be dramatic as all hell, but I didn’t plan it that way. That could be the sub title of my life.

I hope you are well. Or, at least better than the sound of Green Day while going 80 on a California highway in the dead of summer. Cheers.

Love, m.

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