I’m finally mak­ing pro­gress on sort­ing my room out the way I want it to be. It feels odd to talk about my room, or my bed, after so many years of these things being shared, but I sup­posed I’d bet­ter get used to it.

While I was mov­ing all the junk from one end of the room to the other, mak­ing room for a bed that might arrive some­time this side of dooms­day, I was left with a small pile of things that I couldn’t think of a place for. While I stood there, look­ing at them, it occurred to me that the reason these things had no place in my room was because they weren’t mine. They had belonged to me in the past, but some­how I’d left them behind with … everything else.

So, stand­ing there in the middle of my room, miser­able as sin, I decided to make a bit of a cere­mony of it. I fetched a bin-​​bag and for the first time in my life threw out things that weren’t con­cretely iden­ti­fi­able as rub­bish. It was an odd col­lec­tion of stuff, but two things stood out as not­able because they had been birth­day presents. One (a pair of gag sex-​​toy dice) from an ex felt like some­thing no-​​one I even know would own. The other, from a more recent ex (a pic­ture frame that still con­tained it’s pro­mo­tional pic­ture: an image of York), was some­thing that had no-​​use to me bey­ond sen­ti­ment (she bought it for me one year when she had no money, and thought that a pic­ture of my homet­own was bet­ter than noth­ing. She was right), and I real­ised that I had no right to such sen­ti­ments anymore.

Once I’d put my little time cap­sule in the bin I stood there for a while more, look­ing at it; unable to under­stand why such an odd little pile of things should have such a hold on me. While I was stand­ing there, the title of this post popped into my head and I sud­denly had the urge to keep a blog. So here we are. Hav­ing resolved to keep my thoughts here, in the pub­lic domain, the items (the detritus) in the bag lost all their mean­ing because, of course, their only mean­ing was as a link to my past, a crutch for my memory of happy times and hope­fully as a reminder that happy times will be back.

The cere­mony, of course, didn’t help at all. I’m still miser­able. But at least I have a little less junk lying around that I can’t bring myself to throw out, so my room is some­what tidier than it was.