I'm at home, and it's weird. The house is full of boxes - when I got here, my room was the only one that really looked like a room. Now it's got boxes too, along with pictures propped up against the wall, piles of things to sort through, and the suitcase I'm living out of. I'm going through boxes of stuff that I've saved over the years. Some things I can get rid of easily, because I've forgotten what they were. Some things, generally small and otherwise inconsequential, I can't bear to part with. Snowball, this fuzzy creature I had. A little baby Kermit. An old, broken car with 2 Fraggles in it. An insanely ratty Grinch - I was going to get rid of it, but then my mom told me the story that goes with it. Apparently that was my first stuffed animal, brought to me by my brothers right after I was born. As she told me this, I clutched it against my chest and got a little teary-eyed. It went into a box of things to be saved.

There are patterns in the things I've saved over the years. Trophies and awards, of course. Programs from choir concerts, musicals, plays. Maps from trips I've been on. Old artwork. And lots of writing. There are essays from grade school, reports from 3rd grade, a book I wrote and illustrated for my Quest class, my middle school writing folder, and more. Then there are the nonacademic writing pieces. I now have an storage bin filled with my old journals (which I've been keeping for about 10 years now), poems, song lyrics, stuff from WFC, and the quotes I've gathered. In the years to come, I imagine I'll go through this stuff again, and I'll be able to let go of more things. I'm already getting rid of a decent amount of stuff, stuff that I used to think was so crucial. But I don't think that the writing will be as easy to cast aside. Even the shortest school essays from grade school capture my past in a way that no other memento can. The papers, with their changes in handwriting, tone, style, vocabulary, and subject matter, embody me.

Alright, time to sleep. My mind is getting a bit mushy, it seems.