This past weekend we took on the monumental task of cleaning out our storage facility. A lifetime’s worth of “stuff” piled into a 10×10 space that we’ve been renting for $170 dollars a month. With gas prices pushing $5/gallon, it was time to think hard about eliminating unnecessary expenses.
These types of clean up projects have always been stressful. The more I dig through old boxes, the more I realize how much waste I’ve accumulated over the years. I was ashamed to find dresses still with tags on them, and no memory of when or why I’d purchased them. Such terrible materialism.
However, nothing could prepare me for how I’d feel when I found furniture, cutlery and household items from my past life. Life before London. Life before my 24-year-old world fell apart.
You see, I’m a divorcee. Or as close to it as I could be at this point in my life. I had a life with a man for six years. We were high school sweet hearts. We moved in together. We had a baby dog. Someday, we were going to have our happily ever after.
And then suddenly, everything changed. Happily ever after was no longer possible. I was heartbroken.
Bags were packed, the lease was broken and the long, drawn-out, damaging goodbye began. I left for London to start anew and quickly shoved all remnants of that life into tightly sealed boxes never to be opened again.
Until this weekend.
It was like a cruel version of Christmas morning. Boxes and boxes of memories, impossible to know whether good or bad. Childhood photographs! Favourite stuffed animals! Old books! Our kitchen cutlery…
I donated the couch, pots and pans, electronics and appliances to my parents. It made no sense keeping perfectly good things in boxes to gather dust. But as we laid out all the pieces of my old apartment, I couldn’t help but remember that I once had the grown-up life that I’m slowly beginning to long for again. I actually owned my own furniture! I actually invested in non-IKEA kitchenware. I had purchased my first flat screen TV. I was a grown-up in that past life. A house-making, nest-building adult!
As I sat there arranging the familiar pillows and unwrapping old tea sets, I couldn’t help but cry. This is what it must feel like to go through a divorce. I have no ill feelings towards him but wow, how sad that a peaceful life could change so quickly. I don’t miss him at all, but wow, how terrible a feeling it is to have failed so monumentally at a relationship. I don’t miss that life anymore, but still, it was my life for over half a decade. I cried not from regret but because I needed to properly, finally mourn. It was a sadness purge several years in the making.
This past weekend I visited ghosts. The same ghosts I pushed into the back of the closet, hoping they’d disappear. Sometimes, it takes purposeful courage to open that closet door and look them straight in the eye. Exorcism, closure, freedom.
