about 1000 years ago (the last time i cleaned my closets) i made a post about cleaning the closets (and apparently i make a lot of damn posts about closets, because i can’t find the damn thing. anyway, the NBFB told me to block off a day for each closet. i scoffed at his advice. because i scoff at all advice, that’s just the kind of evil vixen i am.

but i think he might be right. i’ve spent the past 2.5 hours in the bedroom closet. i was doing really good for while there, shredding through the debris that made up the floor of the closet and filling an entire garbage bag with stuff to toss out (which means one less box i have to move). but then all too soon the floor was clean and i eyed the turquoise rubbermaid container that sat perched on the shelf.

i was wary of this container. i knew what was in it and was afraid to even start. but i knew i had to. i gingerly picked up the first newspaper and like that, i was transported back to 1995. that box held every issue of the “The Spectator” from my tenure as editor-in-chief. and now two hours later, i’m rubbing the nostalgia from my eyes with newsprint stained fingers. i thought about tossing them all out, tossing the whole lot of stuff out (create-a-caption pictures of 22-year-old me, my ballon-animal drawing collection, poems from friends, an e-mail from jeff johnson filled with advice i should have followed, random signs, etc — all from college). i am not the girl anymore. why do i need that stuff?

i remember once talking with a friend and was abhorred to find that she threw away everything. cards after she’d read them, letters. . . every paper given to her by someone. she didn’t want to be reminded of the past and those people who used to be in her life. i thought that perhaps i could do that too.

but i can’t.

i read it all, my eyes stinging with tears of embarrassment over my own 23-year-old sass and false bravdo. i read it all and then i stacked it neatly back into the container, to be shoved on a high closet shelf that i will take down someday to show my husband and/or children. i kept it all to remember what kind of girl i was, and now i’m kind of glad that she’s grown up.