She stepped up to the closet and opened it. It had been eight years since she last opened it. Her parents always pestered her to get rid of all the stuff and she too had always thought of going through it to discard the unwanted things, yet she barely had time whenever she came home for the one week during the holidays. But this time she made time for herself and she really wanted to get this over with.
When she opened the closet she saw the compartmentalisation of her childhood into piles of comic books, bags filled with pairs of old shoes and clothes, boxes filled with things that once meant the world to her and photo albums of her posing with strangers whom she once called friends.
She picked up a box - the one that was the easiest to grab from the haphazardly arranged closet. She opened it to find a cap - a plain white baseball cap with a red swoosh on the front. It belonged to one of her exes who had left it behind. No… she recalled keeping it for herself as a memory of him.
She put the cap away and then looked at a few of her old assignments from high school - economics, she hated it so much and her dad had helped her out. And then there were a few paintings that her brother had painted for her, back when he was still innocent and she couldn’t care less about because she had problems of her own. A soft ball came next, and then a few collectibles… things she did not even care to pick up.
She placed the box back in the closet and closed it. And she slowly sat back on her bed, looking out of the window that faced the road that she grew up on - the old ash tree that had been there from long before she was born, the broken mailbox that her mom always wanted to fix but never did and the marks on the pavement from when they played hopscotch as kids.
Eight years she thought, reminding herself the last time that any of these things meant anything to her. And the closet, the room and the house spanned seventeen years, all her childhood was in there. Seventeen years of her life. Almost every day of all those years had passed by uneventfully - no major difference between one day and the next, no real significance of time on her daily activities - yet here she was looking back at seventeen years of a life - ‘of her life’ - and all she saw was a closet full of discarded memories.