My Closet is an X on My Personal Pirate Map

So something randomly got me thinking about all the stuff that I have compiled in my room.

Most of it, I admit, is junk. So why do I keep it around? I do not need it. This is for sure. Half of my closet is filled with empty boxes, some of which the original contents have long been discarded. Every time the order arrives to clean my room, I question my own sanity. Why, oh, why do I have so much stuff?

I keep it all for the faintest possibility that I *might* by some rarest of rare occasions, need the box the CD player I got in six years ago came in and will never need to be placed back into. It takes up space, gathering dust, doing nothing. But I never remove it. It's there now and will be there probably until I move out of this house. It's madness, I tell you.

I have shoes I'll never wear again- a broken, ill-fitting, ugly pile. Stacks of papers and folders dating back to before I could even write. Baby books my parents epic failed in filling out. Every essay I've written since I could hold a pen. Books that were too easy for me to read when I was 7. Random assignments from middle school. Will I ever wake up one morning with a sudden urge to read my sixth grade Social Studies quiz on cities in Germany? I highly doubt it. But, it's there if I ever want it.

But throw out this crap? Never! Whenever I do summon the courage to throw some useless object out, I begin to mourn the object as soon as it is no longer possible for me to retrieve it. To most, this is crazy. Am I that materialistic?

No, I don't think I am. It's not the object itself I grieve. It's being in that 6th grade classroom, taking that quiz, after doing a project on Germany with this kid I had a huge crush on and trying to impress him with my stick-drawing portraits of Hitler (I still have those). It's the times all the useless stuff reminds me of that I have such trouble letting go of.

So I shall remain surrounded my humble heaps of junk, letting it remind me of the life I've lived. People always say real writers don't use cliches, but I say they're cliches for a reason. This one holds true: One man's trash is another man's treasure.