I am a notorious packrat; my pockets leak first drafts, bus stubs and receipts whenever I stand up in the subway, my moving boxes are always cluttered with theatre tickets and programs and memorabilia from places I barely recall, and my bookshelves are lined with half-finished tomes, borrowed books that opted to run away from home after all and overstuffed notebooks bleeding ink all over the place. If I don’t have to throw it away, I won’t. This leads to some rather difficult moves from place to place when a simple suitcase simply can’t suffice and my overnight bag becomes laden with half a library because “the bus ride might be longer than expected.”
Then again, I’ve never known a Greyhound to arrive exactly on time. When it did, I had to check my ticket to make sure I wasn’t on the Red Arrow line instead.
Turns out I was.
The mass of mess shrinks and swells depending on where I am and how long I’m staying there. School dormitories compact and split the herd, siphoning the lions share off into boxes and bins that hibernate in my parents basement until I purge them one by one during holiday visits. The bits that survive and tag along tend to reproduce; one playbill spawns another, a first draft begets a little from a table read I pull together with my more theatrical friends. It’s primarily disposable, but there are a few gems within that, no matter where I’ve gone, I find impossible to discard.
The keys for whatever apartment I happen to be rented have lived, for the past decade, on a red lanyard I acquired during my first stint in the ArtsTrek summer camp for burgeoning thespians. I received it at camp when I was a mere sixteen years old, barely able to hold down a job let alone a steady girlfriend, and this lanyard somehow survives a decade of attrition, multiple moves and a touring show. Time and the elements have worn away any lettering on it and it has broken a dozen times, only to be knotted up again into a cohesive loop (or a facsimile thereof.)
Some of my best friends haven’t lasted that long. Time can turn the most dependable rabble-rouser and roaring hearts into quiet, tamped-down pacemakers, marking the days between vacations to Vegas with silent nods and solitary acceptance of having lost something along the way, but not having the werewithal to turn the car back around to peel it off the highway. Priorities shift with the wind; there are houses to be bought, children to rear, plans to make for The Future… and The Future isn’t big enough for all your boxes of first drafts and playbills, so something has to give.
When I thought I’d lost the lanyard once, I tore my room to pieces trying to find it, scouring every last square foot in my search. It was in my jacket pockets, of course, and had the keys themselves only been lost somehow I wouldn’t have minded as much; keys can be re-cut. But the lanyard, nowadays barely still resembling anything like it once was before, would’ve been gone. And I don’t think I’m quite ready to let that one go. Not yet.
polloparringtonpresents 