6/23/25

Before kindergarten, it was Littlest Pet Shops - purchased as a gift at the checkout aisle for good behavior at Summer Camp or with a K-Mart gift card given to me for Easter. I named them all, dressed them, created life cycles and family dynamics, accompanied by my sister's much larger collection. Around 1st grade, it was those small acrylic animals - the inexpensive kind you can find at any given Michaels or Joannes for $2. I created a jungle of tigers, red pandas, wolf pups, and a few lizards that were of a disproportionate size when compared to my wildcats. By 3rd grade, it was Lego - sticking to the $10-$20 mark allowed me to expand my collection much broader than saving my money up to get the bigger ones. I'd make houses and cities and storylines from movies I had the figures to re-enact. Lego stayed the most consistent, but I would continue dabbling in other collections every now and again. My small box of seashells, rocks, and crystals has grown every time I step onto a beach or go for a particularly rocky hike, and my bag full of receipts and ticket stubs is now bursting at the seams. For as long as my mind can remember, I have been someone with an accumulation of knick-knacks, goodies, trinkets, and gadgets, ones that I could never imagine myself parting ways with. As I sit on the floor of the room that has accompanied every nights sleep for the last three years, encircled by the objects I have held onto for the sake of the memories attached to them, I find myself reflecting on the significance of each one, and why it is I feel so compelled to keep them as close to my person as I do. 

For some, having a collection of one thing is a hobby in its own right. Some collect Lego, others collect finished puzzles, and some collect vintage music - cassette tapes, vinyl, CDs, and the like, all to be properly hung and adorned on their walls for observation, and a good conversation starter for those unlucky enough to find themselves in a 30-year-olds room full of antique Star Wars action figures. I just so happen to collect everything. Aside from the toys and collections that have now garnered a different kind of emphasis by my new outlook on them, it initially started when I was quite young. In grade school, we would have "nature walks", an allotted time every Friday after lunch, in which we would venture off to a park or river or neighborhood, and experience a more nature-inclusive recess, during which we were allowed one souvenir. I remember it being one of the hardest decisions of my life, debating between a stick shaped particularly similarly to a sword, or a rock that looked as though it was in its final stages of developing some sort of mythical beast. The significance of keeping a moment in time by the item taken from within it stuck with me, and followed me into my adult years. I would take a flat stone from a trip to the beach, an astoundingly clean quartz rock from a hike, and I've kept and dried the branch of a tree from a forest I visited. As I aged and reached a time when I was old enough to look at any given artifact from my life and think, "wow, that was so long ago", I realized how much I enjoyed it. I began keeping more, my acrylic animals no longer being just an old toy I used to play with, but a physical, living snapshot from a long-extinct version of myself. 

At the end of my freshman year of college, I had my first little box of memories that were all my own - no longer an amalgamation of things my father, with the same disability, thought worthy of keeping, as well as the things I was not yet able to let go of.  This box was full of Polaroids from my first year living entirely independently from anyone I had ever known; it had receipts from birthday dinners with my newly found friends, tickets from the light rail-driven Target runs, and knick-knacks found and given a new life and a new purpose. It was everything that made the life I led what it was, and everything that would allow me to, one day, look back and remember every detail of it. The box grew over the years before I eventually got a red-velvet clad scrapbook to begin dictating the time beyond scattering it within a box under my bed, and now features at least one moment in time from every life I've lived for the last four years - every dorm, holiday spent at home, or day trip with my friends captured on the most significant obsolete items.

For as long as I can remember, my life has been rooted in the concept of "leaving" - living my life completely, without interruption, then leaving and being expected to continue doing the same thing somewhere else. I moved from house, to house, to house growing up. Whether that be in one of the million cases that my Mother, Sister, and I moved into a new house or apartment, or simply the byproduct of having divorced parents with split custody, getting settled was never necessarily an option. What made this as difficult as it was was that there was never a time when my lifestyle was the same. At one house, dinner was unseasoned salmon and green beans, entertainment was a DVD from the library of season 2 of the 2000s hit TV show, The OC, and my bedroom consisted of YA novels and a dresser full of my own clothes. At the other, dinner was walking tacos straight out of the Doritos bag, entertainment was each of us going around the table listing our best and worst moment of the day, and my bedroom consisted of a hand-me-down Nintendo DS, and a closet full of mine and my two step-brothers overnight bags which I had to lug with me to and from school every other Friday and the following Monday. Neither situation was bad; neither situation was glamorous; neither situation was remotely similar. What they were was diasporic. Between each house, school, the car, and my busy parents' work schedule often resulting in my residence at grandparents' and aunts' houses, the items I felt were significant enough to drag along with me on such an expedition often got lost along the way. There are pictures I haven't seen in so long I forgot they existed, souvenirs sitting broken in my step-grandpa's car, memories from moments that shaped the person I am today that I have lost the ability to reflect on. I didn't have a phone like I do now. I can't call up a friend from 7th grade to recall what movie we watched with their parents during our second sleepover. There is nothing but my memory which, though I do pride myself on its strength, will begin to make sacrifices on which memories are more important than others, replacing dinner dates, and the gift shop I stumbled upon on a road trip with grocery lists and how long its been since I last called my mother. 

Within the last four years, I've lived in four places (including the homes I stay at when I return to visit my family). I've gone to Pennsylvania seven times, California three times, New York twice, Washington twice, Oregon, Nevada, Sedona twice, Flagstaff once, Tombstone, Bisbee, Seattle, Los Angeles, Eureka, Olympia, Jerome, Ocean City, San Francisco, and Death Valley. I've gone to get coffee more times than there are stars in the sky, seen more movies than I can count, and gone on even more dates. I've gone to restaurants and truck stops and fast food joints, I've gotten sushi at upscale Michelin star restaurants and equally as impressive, gas stations off the highway. I've had Cosmos and Bloody Marys, and Gin and Tonics. I've gone to pride parades and ICE protests, I've voted, and I've mourned the results. I've met with friends out of state and visited them in theirs, I've smoked my first legally bought cigarette, met my out-of-state boyfriend and smoked his Japanese cigarettes, I've gone thrifting and antiquing in places I will never return to. I've visited Museums, gone to theme parks, and had days at the aquarium. I've celebrated Christmases with my family, birthdays with my friends, Thanksgivings with my cat, Hannukahs, Easters, and Valentine's Days. I moved out of my childhood home(s) on August 15th, 1,042 days ago. 679 days ago, I moved into the apartment I currently live in today. Three hours ago, I put one of the last items in my keepsake box into my scrapbook. 

Within my scrapbook are pictures of my high school graduation party, letters written to me from friends I haven't spoken to since, polaroid of Adam playing the guitar in my dorm, and the first party three 19-year-olds threw in their very first apartment. There are receipts from the coffee truck we used to go to every Saturday, receipts from the vintage store where I bought my favorite sweater. There is a room key of the hotel Katie and I stayed at in New York City, a bottle cap from Caleb's gallon jug of water he exclusively drank from, and the pink-slip ticket I get written to me by ASU police for drinking in the dorms requiring I attend a psychiatry appointment to talk about the dangers of alcohol. Theres a cigaratte butt from the pack I bought the day after my 21st birthday in NYC with an online friend I had known since the pandemic, and a movie stub from the AMC Ty and I went to the second week of living together. Over the years, there have been fleeting moments of anxiety, knowing that there is no real reason that I should be keeping what is essentially junk, just for the sake of "safekeeping". But as I built my scrapbook page by page, and especially now as I write about it, I know how fondly my fingers will trace each one later down the line. 

Every single day for the last 1,042 has been a day that I want to remember. Whether I spent it hiking the Hollywood sign, celebrating my best friends birthday in Central Park, crying on my bathroom floor, sending my first handmade collection down a runway, or sitting in my bed writing, every moment and memory is something that in two, five, or ten years I will look back on through the most loving rose colored glasses and feel the warm sense of longing one can only experience when a memory is truly and forever too far in the past to ever touch again. In 10 years, at the ripe age of 32, I will not have the memories I have now. I won't be able to recall mine and Katie's snowball fight off the side of the road in Eureka, California, nor the kind words my Sister wrote to me on my 20th birthday. When the memory of my first ever date begins to blur with the time Escher and I ate the same restaurent three years later, or the god-awful season Dunkin Donuts coffee I got on the way to Sedona with two girls Im not even friends with anymore gets replaced by an over-due spreadsheet, I want to be able to open up a scrapbook that I made when life yielded the time to do so, and feel as though each page revitalizes the same emotions I felt when I made them.