Hard to Say Goodbye

Friday night, I did something I said I wasn’t going to do. Tired of sorting old computer parts and sick of the packing process, I dumped multiple drawers full of old computer parts into a medium-sized box, taped the box shut, and wrote the following words on the side: COMPUTER JUNK.

It’s definitely not junk. I mean, it is, and it isn’t. I guess if you call modems and network cards that wouldn’t work with any computer made in the past twenty years junk, well, to you it might be junk. Most people would call it junk. Oh, hell, who am I kidding? It’s junk. And now it’s junk inside a box labelled COMPUTER JUNK, and it’ll be moving with us to the new house. It’s literally the number one piece of moving advice people share, and I just did it.

Moving punishes you for your previous decisions at a time when you can’t fix them. I spent hours this weekend packing hundreds and hundreds (and hundreds) of DVDs I should have sold years ago. People say “don’t move them! Get rid of them!” I was always going to sell them, or trade them in, or do something with them, but I didn’t. And now I’m moving them. It’s too late for regrets at this stage in the game. All that’s left is to move the stuff, pop a few more Advil, and figure out what to do when the moving dust settles.

Or, I could do nothing. The DVDs will move into our newly-rented storage unit, next to the four 30-gallon tubs full of CDs I moved there this weekend. That’s what doing nothing looks like — a couple hundred pounds worth of plastic jewel cases, taking up space and collecting dust. I thought someday my kids might like to dig through my old music collection. My kids think of CDs like we think of wind-up phonographs in sepia-toned photos. Neither one owns a CD player. I was going to sell them (the CDs, not the kids), just like I was going to sell the DVDs. Maybe once we get moved into the new house I’ll get around to it, but probably not.

When it comes to what to keep and what to get rid of, I never seem to get it right. Today while packing I demanded we keep our Sesame Street Library, a 15-volume set of hardback books I had as a kid. I mean, these aren’t the same ones I had as a kid; I bought these years later, for my kids to enjoy. My kids never read them. Nobody’s ever read them. And when Susan asks me why I don’t want to get rid of them, I can feel the feeling, but I can’t find the right words. It’s like a word, on the tip of my tongue, that I can’t quite come up with; a reason, like a dream, that dissipates whenever I approach it. I can’t come up with a local reason to keep them, and so I agree to donate them.

When nobody’s looking, I move them back into the “keep” pile. This is the source of drama on every single episode of Hoarders — asking people with too much stuff to decide which stuff they want to keep.

It’s true, all that stuff they say about the amount of things you own expanding to fit the size of your home. Our house is just over 4,200 square feet. I — all of us, really, but especially me — have spent the past seven years carrying load after load of stuff into the house. A little statue here, and old computer there. When you have so much space, you don’t even notice the number of things you’ve accumulated. When you’re scrounging for boxes and bubble wrap and moving them up and down a flight of stairs, you do.

Tonight, when I go back downstairs, I’m going to move the fifteen Sesame Street Library books out of the keep pile and over to the donate pile. It’s a start.