I came home from work one day many months ago to find that my husband had cleared all the junk out of our guest room and made it into a space for me. The stuff we had piled in the closet was gone. The discarded items that had been placed on the floor and then forgotten had disappeared. The bed was covered not with books and boxes but bedding. And in one corner sat my desk, brought up from downstairs, emptied of the detritus of its time in a child’s playroom, and ready for writing.
It was, in every sense of the term, a room of one’s own.
It was meant to be a sanctuary – a place to retreat from clutter and to hide from the crashing about of a small but rambunctious boy. And that’s what it turned out to be, though not in the way he’d first intended.
I spent a lot of time in that room when I was on leave earlier this year. Almost two months straight, I think. I slept there, I read there, I wrote there. I lay awake late at night there and wondered what was going to happen to me. I drank endless cups of tea there. And I found my sanity there.
I was in there again over the weekend. That’s my room to pack as we prepare to move, so I dove in. The desk was easy – it was reasonably well organized and all the stuff it contains is current. No sorting required.
The hope chest was a different story, though.
Another wish-come-true, my hope chest was made by my husband early in our relationship. He sawed and cut and hammered, building the whole thing lovingly by hand. It appeared one Christmas, a complete surprise since he had managed to hide it in the woodworking shop of the apartment building we lived in at the time. When we moved to this house it came with me. It sits there still, housing — until this past weekend, anyway — the same stuff that has hidden within it all this time. Stuff I haven’t really looked at for years, until this weekend.
Opening the lid, I saw the same bits and bobs I remember from all the other times I peeked. My teenage diary, the key long since lost. A small wooden box — painted purple and adorned with a heart flanked by two Rs — that contains a few years’ worth of birthday, anniversary, and Valentine’s cards from my husband and I to each other. (I’ve kept every single one — 13 years’ worth — and that original purple box got full long ago.)
There are several shoe boxes in the collection as well, an informal filing system for things I wanted to keep. One contained old notes — handwritten — from my boyfriends in university. I read a few, laughed and shook my head, and tossed them. I’m not that girl anymore.
Another was full of university-era letters and cards, this time from my mom in the days before email. At the bottom of that box were some letters from my Grandma, who passed away in 2001. That shoe box got put into a moving box, as did the one containing print-outs of all the emails my husband and I sent to each other in the long-distance days of our relationship. I remember the girl who got those letters and emails, and I want to take her with me.
Image credit: Madhya on Flickr
I dug further, through old photos and souvenirs and keepsakes from trips travelled and relationships ended. And then, at the very bottom of the hope chest, tucked in one corner, were journals. Stacks of them. I had forgotten about them entirely. I packed all of it, but now I wonder if I should have.
Everything in that hope chest is at least 10 years old. After this last year, a lot of these hope chest treasures don’t feel like me anymore. The things I cherish I will bring with me, and I feel no regret over relegating the embarrassing ones to the trash. But what about the rest? The journals and photos and mementos that represent a part of my life? In my head that part is long behind me, so much so that looking at those words I can hardly remember the girl who wrote them. She looks like me in pictures, sort of, but not the me I see in the mirror each day.
I think I’m ready to leave some of it behind, but I wonder who I am without it. Will I remember that girl? Is she still in there? Does it matter?
For now I’ve packed it all. I will load it on to a truck and take it with me across the mountains to the other side. And maybe when I get there I’ll be able to answer those questions.
This post loosely inspired by this week’s Be Enough Me prompt: What image or symbol reminds you to Just.Be.Enough?
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