Blankets, stuffed animals, washcloths, dolls, pillows… Anything that is soft enough to hold all of our young strife and all of our young tenderness.
Unrequited love. Specifically, the love where we never say what we feel. The love we had for high school friends that a part of us still believes could be fulfilled even though we haven’t spoken to them in six years.
Songs. Songs that change us for those few minutes they’re playing. Songs by The Beatles and Patrick Park and Fleetwood Mac. Songs we sing in the car when we’re driving home from work and we’re alone, and we feel freer and more private than we ever have, even though we’re on the highway during rush hour.
Paper. Birthday cards, receipts, address books, journals, pictures drawn with crayon on thin, waxy paper, notes from a speech, A+ tests in our favorite classes and B- essays in the classes we hated and tried so hard in. Composition notebooks, lists of names and birthdays and to-dos. We cling to business cards and stickers we’ll never stick, articles cut out from local newspapers and love letters written when our partner was studying abroad in Germany. Movie ticket stubs, concert ticket stubs, theater ticket stubs, gift cards for niche shops we’ll never go to, pages from books long since destroyed by time and water. Scraps of paper with phone numbers and names and job leads. Beer labels we think are pretty. Birth certificates. Cards from our grandmothers with long-gone twenties and fifties that she sent, just because.
People. But not really people. Their stories. We cling to the stories of the people we know and have known. We haven’t spoken to Noah Linklater since eighth-grade, but we still tell the story of when he asked our health teacher how to make a girl squirt. Or Alicia Collins, we haven’t spoken to her since our freshman year of college, but we still tell people the story of her finding out that her father cheated on her mother with her mother’s sister.
Shirts that hide our upper-arms and show off our midriff. Dresses that fall just below our weird-looking knees but still show most of our defined calves. Shoes that hurt like hell but that make us two inches taller. Big sweatshirts that belonged to ex-boyfriends that still smell like them, even after seven wash cycles.
Good pens.
How we felt about Christmas when we were eight. Every year after that it becomes less and less special, but we can still remember when there definitely were reindeer on our roof and almost all of our presents were toys.
Numbers. We cling to numbers on scales and clocks and price-tags. We cling to the number of days we’ve gone without smoking a cigarette and the number of times we’ve seen our favorite movie. Dates, account balances, pairs of shoes, passwords, phone numbers, coupon codes, countdowns, grades. We cling to the number of years we’ve lived and the things we lose and gain by growing older, and older.
Rejection. Acceptance we let go of like crusty, used tissues we don’t want to hold onto as we walk down the street, but rejection we keep like a chronic rash on our heart.
A sixth-grade award for most sportsmanship in soccer and a valedictorian cord at our high school graduation and anything else we can hold in our hands as proof that we were here and that we mattered and that people knew it.
Noise. Repeats of our favorite TV show and mindless pop music and classmates talking about their Organic Chemistry test and coworkers talking about the best orthodontists in the area. The fridge running and your dog barking and a chair rocking. Above all we cling to the noise, because the noise fills us up, and without it we have to find out what’s still in us when it’s gone.
