Emmeline was a keeper. She kept the notes she'd passed to Layne and Sandra in first grade, and the birthday invitations she'd been sent in third. The colorful bills of foreign cash were set aside next to the shiny coins and the detached buttons that once bedecked her frilly dresses, and the love letters she'd received were scattered and wedged within the piles and piles of photos and negative strips. Her favorite homework assignments sprawling with doodles had their own special drawer, and beneath her bed were mounds of books she'd probably never read again beside the hole-strewn two-toned shoes that once led her on her curious adventures.
She could not let these things go.
They were a part of her and only her. If she were to leave these things to the wild nature of the world, she would never see them again. She would lose all memory of these certain times, certain instances with certain memorability. They would vanish, as would her sense of who she was at that specific instance in time.
She was not like Lola, who could fall out of love with an object just as easily as she fell into love with it in the first place.
She was not like Clara, who saved her love for one and only one thing.
On the late and antsy nights, when she could not force her eyes to stay shut, she would peruse her things. Old and new, she would remember the good and the bad memories. She would sit and sift through the endless papers and pictures and moneys, ticket stubs and receipts, buttons and negatives and ribbons. She would think and think and really try to remember, which at some point she had forgotten how to do.
And she simply could not bring herself to get rid of any of these things.
No matter how large the piles grew over time, no matter how high her bed stood upon a cushion of books, no matter how useless and unimportant these little things seemed to others- she could not and would not become vulnerable to forgetting.
photocred: the fashion spot
