Today, I made an attempt to clean my room. Notice the key word of that sentence is “attempt”. It’s not that it was messy really, I just have a lot of stuff to go through.

I’m not on a “full out hoarder” level yet, but I could be categorized in the “how does one accumulate this much stuff in just seventeen years” stage.

When I say I cleaned my room, I really just rearranged all my stuff so it looks more organized and sane. It’s not about how crazy you are, it’s about how well you can hide your crazy. I hide mine pretty well, under all the dust and old junk piles, that is.

I have this shoebox underneath one of my junk piles, and it’s full of miscellaneous papers, pictures, cards, gum wrappers, pages, sticky notes, etc etc. Sometimes, I’ll stumble across an old photo, note, or a random receipt from the Asian market, and I’ll just sit on my floor and stare at it. A flashback of the person I was with or the adventure we had gotten ourselves into starts to play in my mind, and it’ll make me kind of sad.

After I transferred schools and made other significant changes in my life, I lost a lot of people, notes, and random receipts. They just sort of disappeared.

This makes me pretty upset if I overthink it, and starring at a picture of an old friend who I haven’t talked to in a year is a bittersweet feeling.

But, no matter how crazy you may consider yourself, or how big of a change you made in your life, it’s your job to keep filling the shoebox, people.

Just because there was a little change of direction doesn’t mean you can stop going on random trips to the Asian market with your friends.

And so today, even though I found a good chunk of old memories that I know are forever crumpled in the past, it’s okay.

They’re still going to stay in my dusty shoebox, just more towards the bottom. Because I’m going to go out tonight, and get more miscellaneous papers and notes and photos and cards, and keep stocking up so that a few years down the road, I can shuffle through all of my old stuff on my bedroom floor and waste another hour.

Yours truly,

Maddie Rheinheimer