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2007-02-25 - 3:50 p.m. My mom is moving, so I came back to Colorado to help her, and pack up my stuff. I sure have had a lot of stuff. I never used to throw anything away, because everything meant something different. If somebody gave me something, I felt like I would be hurting them if I got rid of it six years later. My grandma bought me a digital camera one year for christmas, and I lost it, or it got stolen, or something. The next year, when I went to visit, I had an old 35mm camera, and she said, innocently, "Oh that's cool, where'd you get that from?" And I felt terrible, and I always save things because I don't want to feel terrible. So I collected things, but my mom said I had to get rid of some of it, so I went through all my stuff. I've never thrown away a notebook before, so I read through all of those. All of my ideas, scrawled out and forgotten. All of my drawings, embarassing and usually unrecognizable. All the conversations on pages passed back and forth in class, a precurser to text messaging. My freshman year of high school I had a crush on this cheerleader in my english class. I have a bunch of written down conversations with her in a notebook. I never had a class with her again, after that one, which was very disappointing. When we graduated there was a party for the seniors at some place I don't remember, but I remember her coming up to me and talking to me there, after three-and-a-half years of nothing. I found a note from her in the back of a notebook, saying "call me" with her number. I have framed pictures from that homecoming dance. I have the flyer from Anne's graduation party. I have the signatures from a few dozen girls who just might become famous someday. I have some deflated Applebees balloons, even though I think the Applebees here closed down a few years ago. I have every card I've ever received, every letter, every lengthy note. I have letters from girls in Indiana, in Norway, in California, in Halifax, in Portugal, in Germany, in Maine, in Australia, and probably more. I have birthday cards from when I was seven-years-old. I have notes from a girl who died the summer after she wrote them, surreally telling me to live life to the fullest, because you don't get that many chances. Eventually, I just started throwing stuff out. Boxes tossed into the dumpster, and although I'm sure I'll worry about what was in the bottom of them, I'll forget about it eventually.

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