(spring) Cleaning

I am always amazed at the amount of dust that accumulates. The things that add up when I’m not looking carefully enough, or sometimes even when I am. I am surprised to see, looking around my apartment, once empty, that it is full. Mismatched sofas bought from strangers online, soil in corners from spilled houseplants, curtain rods bent in a haphazard move. My apartment has no closets, and I am confronted at each side of the house, a pile of things I wish would be hidden. It is hard to make your life seem tidy, when the evidence against you is stacked higher than your shoulders.

Without me noticing, my things have become old. My laptop, more tape than structure; my sheets more holes than substance, my body, more memory than life. I have never known when to replace things. When to throw them out. I look out my window at the buildings of a city built one brick at a time, I see the line where the old and the new divide, I see my things, my clothes, even the dresser itself, are the shell of someone I no longer am.

I sneeze whenever I go through my closets. I suppose I am allergic to the discarded personas of my past. Or maybe it is the mold that grows in the absence of use.

I wish I had taste. I do not know what goes together. I have furnished my apartment with the things I can find and the things I can afford. Taste is a luxury of time- developed over the years of seeing the things around you and appreciating them. It’s hard to stop to smell the flowers when you are too busy running from yourself. Or maybe it’s easy to be lost in the things around you, extrospection luring the mind from the body. I did not branch out; I burrowed.

How can I create new things, be a new person, when my brain has always been itself? How do you rewire a hardwire? I have spent the afternoon cleaning the dust off the places I am too short to see. I have spent my morning searching for new things to accumulate dust. My plants, stationary for so long, have a covering of film of unknown origin. Humidity sticking our discarded skin sells to its leaves. The cat hair, the human hair, the dandruff and the breath, leaving pieces behind that we haven’t ever noticed to be gone. Maybe growth is a venn diagram of leaving and staying. Maybe growth is found in the space created by the things that leave.