Tis the season to be jolly

-I’ve tidied up your closet, and the drawer under your bed, says my mom.
-You have? [mind races as to what she may have found in there.] You have. Ok.I can deal with my mom stumbling on my things. I am an adult now, aren’t I?
-There’s so much strange stuff in there, and I needed space to put away my summer things, so I got rid of some of your old stuff.
- Can’t you wait til I get home and do that myself? And how do you know what to throw out anyway?
- -Oh, but I’m not throwing anything out. Guess how much I got for your old pairs of goth boots?
- My boots. You didn’t. They were relics!
- Well it’s not like you were going to wear them anymore.
- Maybe I was!
- Oh well, they’ve made someone happy now. Maybe they were putting a show and needed costumes. And! I managed to sell your stereo! First I used the speakers to put flowerpots on, but I thought they were still good, so I took them down to the flea market too.
- What am I going to do for music now, then?
- There’s always my cd player
- The old piece of shit in the kitchen. Right.
- So when you come home, you might want to think about what to do with the huge stack of magazines. Oh, and, there’s that bundle of exercise books all tied up together, I didn’t have a look at those, but we can have a bonfire when you’re here.

At least I was spared the ultimate humiliation. That carefully tied up bundle of books are my early teenage diaries, complete with details of sorrows and tears and crushes and ponderings and tampax experimentations. Not pretty.

I wonder why the sudden urge for clearing, and why my room.
Everything else in the house remains untouched. My brother’s room in particular is a mausoleum of his 19 years of life. Books on the foreign policy of Guatemala or the changing geographies of the Finnish-Russian borders or a political and historical assessment of the middle East; his posters of tennis players; and his collections: coins, notes, vials of sand from all the deserts of the globe, cigars, 19 Century lead soldiers.
I never collected anything, and I’m still alive. Maybe that doesn’t grant my old room any sort of special status. I’m not really bitter about it; but I am considering the bonfire. Except that I’ll be the one to do away with my stuff. Get your matches ready, mom.