I cleaned my room today.
Now, my usual definition of “clean” means that roughly 70% of my floor is visible, I can find the sweater I’m looking for in under five minutes, and that I can close my closet doors without breaking a sweat. But today, when I say that I cleaned, I mean that I dusted, I vacuumed, I tidied up, and I organized. For once, clean means clean.
As I began the laborious task, my brother Caleb walked into my room.
“This room looks really messy. It makes me want to cry.”
I attempted to defend myself. “I’m working on it!!!” but he just walked out, laughing.
I kept on anyway, and finished some time later.
My parents were absolutely ecstatic. In typical Dad-fashion, when my father walked by, he gasped “Jaz!!! when did you get a floor?!?!” and my mother clasped her hands in rapture and exclaimed “thank you! oh thank you! It’s so lovely! Why don’t you keep it like this all the time?!”
Depending on how well you know me, the fact that I’m such a disorganized person at home may surprise you. It’s true that I keep my notes and school assignments in order, and I’m OCD like you wouldn’t believe when it comes to kitchens, but my room is a different matter entirely.
The truth is, I’m a pack rat, in the most random and haphazard sense of the word.
While I was cleaning today, I found dozens of receipts for beads and shampoo and cups of coffee that I’d just never thrown away. I found a decades-old Monopoly game that I bought at a garage sale at least 3 years ago because I liked the classic design of the money and playing pieces. I found vintage greeting cards that have never been written in, and magazines I’d never gotten around to reading.
Sure, there are also the things that normal girls save, like movie ticket stubs and notes from friends. Plenty of people keep paraphernalia like that around for a while, I just can’t bring myself to get rid of any of it. Which is why I have every single birthday card I’ve gotten since I was eight.
There’s this pair of puffy polyester plastic-heeled boots that I got at Goodwill, back when I thought I could pull off dressing like a hipster. I wore them once. That was freshman year, I believe.
I found a canvas that I had started painting months ago. I was going to make it into my best multi-media piece yet, but it still holds only paint.
I have mix CD’s from middle school that are covered with doodles of hearts and flowers that have titles like “Jazmin’s favorite songs everrrrrrrrrr” and “LOVE!!!!!!!!” There are used books that I bought because I liked the cover but I’ve never read, and there are dozens of index cards scribbled with citations for Writing 123.
And everywhere, absolutely everywhere, there is paper. I have countless handouts from church, schedules of studies and articles on people like Rob Bell and copies of song lyrics. Sad and short-lived attempts at poetry haunt half full notebooks. My to-do lists from last term and last year are still hanging out in my desk drawers. The backs of envelopes are the keepers of questions I never found answers to, and gum wrappers have become tiny airplanes.
It’s pretty safe to say that I have a hard time ever throwing anything away.
Now, the question is, why the heck do I still have all that stuff, and why am I writing about it?
I do have an explanation, of sorts.
If I’ve ever forgotten to call you back, or give someone in my family a message for you, or bring you something, or - heaven forbid - I forgot your name, you know that I’ve got a pretty terrible memory.
But I think that life is actually something worth remembering. That’s how we learn, isn’t it? Looking back at past conversations and experiences give us knowledge to move forward. Remembering who we were helps us establish who we are, and who we want to be.
I want to enjoy my life, but I also want to remember WHY I enjoyed it.
And so, that is why I write, that is why I save things. I want to have stories to tell. I want to carry the wisdom that I’ve earned the hard way with me. I want to remember what made me smile, the relationships I loved, the times I failed and was rescued, and the mundane moments that turned into something beautiful.
Everything that I save has a story. For instance, I saved those puffy boots because I loved the story that goes along with them. The one time I wore them was to youth group, back in high school. My friend Tiffany decided they were awesome, and got our other friends to say that they agreed the boots were awesome.
Those boots were not awesome when I put them on. But they became awesome, because of my friends.
I love that story. It’s not about the boots, though. That story is about Tif and I, and about the kind of relationship we had back then. It makes me smile, every single time I think about it. And so, I kept the boots.
I’ve got hundreds of stories that I could tell, all because of the “junk” I’ve gathered and watched over for all these years. Those stories aren’t even exclusively about my close friends - if you’re a part of my life, even at all, I have a story I could tell about you. And if I have a story to tell about you, that means I care about you.
The most beautiful thing about stories, to me, is that the whole story is never about only one person. Even if the person in a story lives alone in a forest and eats only berries and tree bark, at some point, that person had parents. There’s always someone else involved in a story. We need each other.
If I were to attempt to tell “my” story, I would soon have to admit that, in truth, it’s OUR story. It’s our story because, at some point, my story and your story collided. There was a scene, or maybe an entire chapter, that unfolded the same way for both of us, we just tell that story with different voices.
And I guess that’s what this is rambling has been, a written celebration of the idea that i have a story and you have a story and that, for some reason, they ran into each other and neither story has been the same since.
