Inventory

I was moving house recently.  In preparation, I emptied out all the boxes hiding in the corners of my closet.  Caches stashed away since the day I moved in, things precious enough to keep but not precious enough to remember.  You could call me a collector, I suppose, but I don’t think that term is quite right.  I don’t go out of my way to collect things; I just have a hard time throwing things away.  It feels like throwing away parts of myself.  I don’t take many photos, and never have, so I keep my memories in objects instead.

Because of this habit, before moving I had to play an odd game of guessing.  Sitting on the carpet in my room, squeezed between moving boxes and furniture, I poured out the contents of each box stored away in my closet, one by one.  I sifted through all the memories I’d saved up and decided which ones to keep.

Collection of Star Wars droids

I bought Quilt on a family holiday while going through a bad bout of bodily dysphoria.  I felt alone in my depression, letting myself be dragged around by family members and trying my best to enjoy sightseeing against my brain’s will.  Something caught my eye when I spotted them in the corner of a souvenir shop.  Cute little bedsheet-ghosts, each one isolated inside a glass bottle.

I took one back to the room we were staying in. That night, lying on a bed a little too short for me, I made a discovery.  As I took the ghost out of my bag to hold it, I saw that their blanket glowed in the dark, a neon green colour like the stars I had on my bedroom ceiling as a child.  Normally I found that colour to be off-putting—cold and distracting.  But that night it was nice to be able to see their little face, even in the dark.

I named them Quilt (gender-neutral pronouns).  Hardly a creative name for a bedsheet-ghost but it felt right.  After taking them home, they sat on my bedside table for some time, their soft glow providing me company at night.  Eventually, I worried more about their own safety and moved them to a spot on my desk, where I was less likely to knock them off in the night.  They didn’t get as much sun there and didn’t glow as bright anymore.

Starting when I was 14, my taste in media was consumed by Japanese animation.  I’d spend days binging entire seasons of television shows.  It was during this period of obsession that a well-meaning friend, doing their honest best to understand the interests we did not share, bought me this birthday gift.

In the moment, receiving the box with the smiling figurine inside, I had to put on an equally smiley face.  I couldn’t refuse a gift, of course, so I had to bury that awkward feeling in my chest and grin and try to put as much false enthusiasm into my ‘thanks you!’ as possible.

The moment my birthday was done, I hid the thing away in my closet.  I didn’t know what to do with it. I didn’t want to look at it; I didn’t even want others to see it.  That figurine carried an ugly mixture of guilt and embarrassment with it.  It was a reminder that I was starting to pull away from the friends I’d had; we no longer shared all our interests in common.  So, I put it in a box full of other forgotten things, willing it to join them.

I hadn’t kept it this long because I’d made the decision to, but because I had refused to make any decision at all.  I finally had to confront it.  The figurine held no value to me but it could to someone else. So, I gave it away.  I don’t see that friend much these days anyway.

Metal case overstuffed with Pokémon cards

The Pokémon craze hit my school sometime around first or second grade.  Not the video games—my friends would get into those later—but the card game.  I still vividly remembered my friend’s binder full of cards, each one in a plastic pocket, sorted by type.

I didn’t know where this sudden craze came from; somebody’s older sibling probably passed it down to us.  It was funny, but since we were so young, none of us knew how to actually play the card game.  We simply judged the worth of a card by how impressive the artwork looked and, always as a secondary consideration, how high the numbers printed on it were.  I always preferred the cute and cuddly critters over the most powerful, so my deck probably wouldn’t have stood much of a chance in a real game anyway.

The craze died down after maybe a month or three and the cards vanished from school.  Mine moved several houses with me but always as something that just got put back in some box or drawer.  I didn’t know why I kept them this long; at no point had I thought I would actually pick up the game.  Nowadays, most of my friends are card game fanatics (or at least happy to indulge those of us who are), and my partner is a recovering Magic the Gathering addict.  We haven’t ever played the Pokémon Trading Card Game, and at this point I doubt we ever will.

I just kept these cards because they’re something to flip through and reminisce about when my school was enraptured by a card game they didn’t know how to play.

Set of Stamps with Flower Illustrations

The last thing I found while cleaning out my closet was a little mystery.  Hiding at the bottom of a box was a set of post stamps.  Looking at them, I felt the smallest tinge of familiarity but I think I was only remembering another time that I had found them while cleaning up.  As to where these came from, I was at a complete loss.

I sat back, resting from the half-kneel half-crawl position I had adopted while sorting through my things.  This was the most troublesome puzzle yet.  What would I do with these?  Surely I didn’t need to keep them.  I didn’t have a single memory attached to them.  But they were rather pretty.  They didn’t take up much space either.  And I suppose the bemusing mystery I found myself in was a memory in the making itself.

In the end, the latter argument won out in my mind.  I couldn’t say that I’d ever do anything with this set of stamps—they might be too pretty to use as post stamps—but for now they’d come with me.  And maybe I could imbue some more memories into them as I went.  Photographing and writing about them could even be the first step.