Forgotten Memories

This week my packing focus has been on my storage unit. If you don’t have a storage unit, you are a lucky person. My storage unit is chock full of items that moved from garage to garage, until I no longer had a garage to store them in.

While digging through the boxes, the first 25 years of my life flash before me at an alarming speed. In one box, I might find reminders of my early twenties. Scripts long forgotten and purses filled with business cards for former friends.

Remember when that’s how you gave someone your number? Somewhere I still have a box of my own business cards. My cell phone number and my smiling face, a headshot taken when I was 19 years old.

The next box might have stuffed animals, creatures that at one point were so dear to me. I hug each one, tears in my eyes, as I remember the seven year old who named each and every one of them. Now I can’t remember their stories, and as Toy Story 3 haunts my mind, I place them in the goodwill box.

The next box holds reminders of high school. I see pictures of school dances, pictures without me in them. I see my friends all dressed up, and marvel at how we’ve all changed. So many of them are married, some starting families. Others are lost to me, the few people from my past that I haven’t found on facebook. I find photographs of myself, and wonder if I knew how pretty I really was. I see other pictures that cancel out that vanity; I was not immune to the awkward years.

I put item after item in the box for goodwill. Scrap of memory after scrap of memory in the trash. Birthday cards, holiday cards. Postcards from people I’d almost forgotten existed. When did I, the girl with the remarkable memory, make enough memories to start forgetting? What else have I forgotten?

It’s a sobering thought.

In short, I urge you to sort through your life more often than every 30 years. Don’t let your childhood sit in boxes; waiting for you to uncover it and realize how much your life has changed.

In other news, I did find almost all of my NES games, as well as the system. Please work Nintendo, this Internet Super Mario Brothers 3 isn’t cutting it.

Sadly that is the one game I have yet to locate.