38 cardboard boxes

i have decided that snails have it much better. they can ooze about without a care, carrying their spiral homes snug on their backs. no baggage. no worries.
we humans on the other hand manage to fill our homes with scores and scores of things. i understand the meaning of the word 'stuff' in its fullest sense now. stuff is tons of indescribable, unclassifiable things that follows you around stuffed in cardboard boxes unto eternity.
i wonder why we cant just do with memories... why does it have to be corroborated with stuff? we are such rotten romantics at heart and like the silly bower birds we pile our lives with debris and tinsel from the past, holding on fast to faded pictures and jaded moments.
we live lives as if we were eternal. perhaps there is no other way. we amass material things while our emotional quotient runs dry.
we buy, consume, build and hoard in such a frenzy.
i remember the time when all my belongings would fit into two steel trunks and a suitcase. now i need a truck and a quarter.
come vacations and we would empty our rooms in the hostel, roll up the mattress and label our trunks and drag them into the box rooms.
sometimes, on hot, lazy summer afternoons, the musty, thick smell of the box rooms comes seeping back to me. and the feeling it brings is difficult to describe.
it reminds me of empty corridors and muffled sounds. i can feel the sun scorching my skin again and hear vague footsteps and distant laughter.
i was wondering why this memory is not happy. why does this particular memory make my head and heart feel heavy?
v and r both remember this smell and it fills them with the same unease too.
i think it is because it reminds us of times, when in spite of the vigor and optimism of youth, we were unsure of what was coming next. or maybe it reminds us of the vitality that we had then and how hopeful we were, of how much we had to look forward to, our lives were only just beginning. it reminds us perhaps, that we are now more fragile.
i like the way celine puts it in before sunrise, “i had this funny… well, horrible dream the other day. i was having this awful nightmare that i was 32, and then i woke up, and i was 23… so relieved… and then i woke up for real and i was 32.” poignant.
it is odd to see your home stripped bare. it looks naked, exposed and vulnerable, words echo and bound off the white walls as if they were seeking to belong. little things that were left for lost turn up in dirty corners, an earring that was removed in haste, a letter that was pressed into the pages of an old book, coins and bits of string, shadows remain where once hung pictures and warm, orange lamps.
it is essential i suppose… cardboard boxes filled with stuff are good things. they bear witness to the fact that you have so much to cherish, that your life has been so full of fondness, of people who have loved you and whom you have loved. i have changed my mind. snails might not have such a good thing going after all.
stuff is good. stuff means that you have indeed lived your life, and now have the courage to look at all that has gone by and say, “yes, this is who i am. the sum total of every moment lived with love and honesty, the flotsam, the weeds and the tinsel... are all mine.”