Penny Post #17: What I’ve Left Behind
an ode to forgotten things
I sit here in my very plush, very comfy grey chair - a chair I spent weeks begging for and years resting in. I stare around my near-empty room. I notice the Pottery Barn desk I’ve had since I was old enough to have homework, where many of my arts & crafts projects are framed above. I notice the bookshelf that I bought and put together as a pandemic project - and all of my favorite stories and authors that will soon be left behind. I notice my bed and remember the times as a child when my brothers and I would play in the frame and marvel at how “big kid” it appeared. To this day, I’ve never slept better than in this bed - my bed - and I’m afraid I will never sleep as well as I do here. I see my shag carpet - one I tiptoed around when vacuumed so as not to interrupt the perfect lines and one I would cry into as if the floor would understand my need far more than any other surface. It is strange to look at these things that have accompanied me through so much of life - that have grown strange and familiar again in the passage of time - and to think one day I might not recognize them.
Something tells me that they wouldn’t ever forget me.
They’ve held down the fort while I’ve been away building a mind and a heart and a spirit and they’ve always welcomed back the new Kiera - however unrecognizable - and proven that she’s not that far off from a Kiera they once loved.
To look at something you once knew so well and to know you will never again know it as well as you do right now is an eerie feeling.
I never think about these things while I’m away - why would I? And yet, like Andy’s faithful collection of toys, these pieces of my room have never not thought of me. There’s no life here without me.
And yet there is everything, so much life without them.
The reflection above is one I wrote several months ago, when I moved out of my childhood home and ventured cross country. I haven’t thought about all the things I’ve left behind except for how they exist in this essay. I’m reminded of them - the gray loveseat, the pottery barn desk, the pandemic bookcase - as I visit other places and am reminded of other things that I’ve left behind.
I traveled to New Jersey this weekend for a radio show that my dad was hosting. The whole family came in to celebrate. We are staying at my Grandma’s beach house. This is a house I spent many summers in as a kid, surrounded by cousins and aunts and uncles. During our first night here, my dad noted how “worn” it seemed, and yet the wornness of the house reveals the memories that live in its walls.
Cherished memories of Kaboodles Ice Cream, mini golf, long days spent on the beach, lessons of how to duck under a crashing wave, racing hermit crabs, large family dinners, sandy hair, crisp skin, and too many trips on the skyscraper at Seaside Heights.
I’ve left behind the things that hold these memories: the drawers that store forgotten amusement park tickets, the carpet where many Monopoly games were won and lost, the bedding that I found warmth within at the end of a long day & I fear that I’ve lost the memories themselves.
Yet the memories flood back when I step over the threshold of Grandma’s house and inhale the smell of Jersey Shore summers.
Although I’ve left the things behind to find life elsewhere, the memories remain. I will hold onto them as long as they’ll let me.
Something tells me they’ll let me hold on for a long time.
Where does your nostalgia live?
K
P.S. Cruelty can find itself in the imagined humanity of inanimate objects.