carrie bradshaw strikes again

i had another column published in baltimore gay life today! dorkily enough, i never stop getting excited about it. enjoy...or not...

Packrat

I've never been good at letting things go. Ideas, memories, people, things: I just seem to hold on to them as long as I can, until I forget them or they break or they're given to Goodwill by my mother. This past weekend, therefore, wasn't easy for me: I moved from my current apartment, the one I shared with my most recent ex, to a new one (across the street). I said goodbye not just to my roommate and ex, but also to my friends Tom and Brian, both of whom decided to move away on Saturday. I took ownership of a new apartment and spent three days sorting through years of belongings, my boyfriend wondering the whole time why I still had a t-shirt from eighth grade, a shirt that I wouldn't even consider wearing anymore but have now boxed up and moved four times.

I can't explain why I hang on to possessions the way I do. I'm not one of those people you see on Oprah, their houses filled floor to ceiling with refuse. I don't have children in their mid-20's who write letters to Oprah then bombard me with television cameras while I'm doing laundry or getting out of bed, the television audience laughing and covering their mouths, gasping for breath, horrified and amused by the decades of filth I have in my house. The way I collect
things is more subtle. The things I choose to keep aren't egg cartons or old razors. I collect things that most people wouldn't notice: I only wear a fraction of the clothes in my closet; I haven't used the coffee pot that I just rescued from the garbage in two years.

Why do I hold on to things like this? Having to pack it all up in boxes, preparing for my big move across the street, I've had lots of time to think about it. It's because I attach memories to things. I know that I'm supposed to live in the now; I know that worldly possessions only hold me down, and that material things like shirts and coffeepots don't matter in the long run. Let me give you an example. That Budweiser ringer-tee that I haven't worn in three years? It was given to me by my college roommate's boyfriend who was too big to fit into it. I was wearing it the second time I hung out with the man I spent college dating. I stood next to a reservoir, flirting with him while he played with his golden retriever. I wore it while I rested my head on my best friend's stomach, laying under atree in a cemetery at dusk in Indiana. If you were to show me most of the clothes in my closet, I could tell you not only where I got them, but also several things that happened to me while I was wearing them.

I know that this all sounds just a little too Miss Havisham for my own good; that a 25-year-old urbanite shouldn't spend so much time dwelling in the past. I don't dwell in the past, honestly, but throwing away certain possessions would be like closing chapters of my life. It almost seems as if getting rid of something is like throwing away the memory that I associate with it.

I faced this issue again this weekend as I was moving, but on a much grander scale. I looked around the apartment, which had just been painted back to white (you know, we just had to decorate), and it looked so strange. It was empty--a place that held so much life and promise, a place that had felt more like home to me than anything has since I left my parents' house, had become any other apartment, ready to be filled with another person's life.

I started to get upset--I was sad for the lover I'd had while I lived there and for the friends who had passed through, the same ones I now find scattered across the East coast. And I was sad thinking that it was all as if this home had never existed. The next person to live in that apartment will never know that it was the place I felt safest, and they'll never know the joy or pain that happened there.

"I just feel so frustrated," I told Michael, the man I'm dating, yesterday. "I feel like I'd come so close to building a home and now I have no choice but to start over."

"You already have," he said.