SATC: Storage Units

I am currently trying to figure out how to fit the majority of my belongings — bedding, winter jackets, etc., all brand new at the beginning of the year — into four plastic storage boxes that are turning out to be much smaller than I had expected. Now, my comforter bears evidence of the times I was too lazy to eat at my desk and I have a pile of books to take home along with the three I originally brought in the fall. I sit on the floor of my room, exhausted from overstuffing a plastic container and bruised from carrying boxes all the way up College Hill.Packing makes me feel defeated. It makes me miss living out of a duffel bag, wearing only one shirt for a week-long backpacking trip, and vacuum sealing my swimsuits in Ziploc bags while hostel-hopping with friends. I am slightly embarrassed to admit that I have been brought to tears more than once by the process. Usually it’s just residual stress and sleep-deprivation, but this time it’s the overwhelming realization that a year has gone by and the home I have made here is about to be given to someone else. I feel like a hermit crab, packing all my stuff up and moving on to the next shell. I’m scared. It’s simple, really, although I think it’s hard to admit and even harder to put into words. Maybe it has to do with the changed appearance of my once-new dorm furnishings; my space feels feel lived-in, comfortable, and I don’t want to have to start this process all over again.This time, however, I won’t actually have to do that. Sure, I’ll have to get up off the floor and pack the remaining two plastic boxes. I’ll have to unpack them again in the final sweaty days of August. I’ll have to pin my photos up on a new wall and cross my fingers, hoping my pottery didn’t break during the move. But I won’t have to go back into Bed, Bath, & Beyond (thank god), and my comforter will already smell like my laundry detergent. This Wednesday I will help my friend hastily pack after her Orgo exam. I will meet my friends’ parents as they come to pick up boxes (and Miranda’s new dog, whose cuteness I truly cannot overstate). I have been putting off packing, lounging on the Main Green and getting sunburnt while observing the flood of people emerging from hibernation. I have been putting it off because I don’t want to scrutinize every object I have lived with for the last year. I don’t want the flood of memory that will come with it, the good and the bad and everything in between.I also have to figure out how to ship my things across the country. This means packing a box under a certain weight, and I’ve begun to think about that kind of weight in two different ways. Obviously, the physical mass is necessary to account for. But there is another kind of weight, one I discovered while breaking down my year simply in terms of the actual events that occurred.On the phone with a friend from home, I listed out some time stamps and became slightly overwhelmed. “Wow,” I said, taking a breath between first and second semester. “This is a lot to think about.”My friend on the other end offered to change the subject, but I realized that outlining the events of the year in such a skeletal form was helping me to catalogue my thoughts. When packing up a box, there is a certain amount of contortionism required to fit everything Tetris-style. But if you spend too much time carefully placing every object, you’ll never get anything done. I’ve learned this the hard way. If I give everything the same weight, the box will be much too heavy to send all the way to California. There are other things to be wary of when storing your belongings over the summer. Last year, for example, a friend of a friend lost fifty dollars to a moving company when trying to withdraw a reservation. In my refusal to miss any opportunity for metaphor, I see this as a cautionary tale. Sometimes we have to sacrifice things for our memories, for our attachment to the past. Other times, we realize that we just don’t have enough boxes to store everything.I once told my dad that I wanted to live only out of a suitcase and a box or two for the first few years following college. He scoffed, and now I realize why. While I like the idea of being able to pick up and move around as I choose, I understand now that collecting memories is not the same as hoarding or being tied down. I can’t hold onto everything, but there is value in anchoring my memories in something tangible.For example, I have a very sentimental relationship with books and pottery (which happen to be two of the most difficult items to transport). I like to read with a pencil, underlining sentences I like and dog-earing pages every now and again. Then I trade books with my friend Joe, and he does the same. Later, I can look back and see where our attention overlapped and diverged. Sitting next to the books on my shelf, I have an absurd-looking ceramic shot glass and a mug that reads “MALE TEARS,” both gifts from friends. I have a small sculpture I made in senior year and a delicately painted bowl from a trip to Italy last summer. On the other hand, there are things I can’t hold onto, intangible things that are impossible to capture. As much as I want to, I can’t take an iPhone picture of every beautiful sunset I see (and even if I did, the photos would not do justice to the reality). I can’t write down every funny thing someone says. I can’t bottle up the feeling of getting into bed after a long day or the sound of my sister’s laugh on the other end of a FaceTime call. There are some things that we cannot express in material form, that we just can’t fit into an (already-broken) Bed, Bath, & Beyond box no matter how hard we try.I’ve come to realize that, as difficult as it is to leave things behind, it’s not only natural, but necessary. If I remembered everything, I wouldn’t be able to differentiate between the memories. I wouldn’t know what was important enough to pack up and leave in storage, what I should take home with me, and what I should let go of. The people and places and things I do manage to keep with me are an extension of my memory; they remind me of the things I cannot remember on my own or the things that I know but am unable to actually articulate myself. We are each other’s storage units. That’s not a very elegant metaphor, but honestly, figuring out how to fill those plastic boxes is all I can think about right now. The only way to get this done is to take a deep breath, get up off the floor, and start going through my things. I will try not to give anything too much weight, but I will remember not to disregard the importance of some things over others. When I get frustrated, I will try to remember that I am not packing alone, that everyone else on campus is facing the same mountainous task. If I forget, I’m sure someone will remind me. Image via.