all my things are not alive.

Change is hard for me, because...

…I create nostalgia around everything. I’m about to move again, and I’m thinking about the last big move I made, in 2021, out of the apartment I grew up in.

I didn’t like this apartment. It was the address on my parents’ divorce papers, the bedroom door I slammed in childhood fury and then in teenage despair, and it was the home I returned to every time my mom was sick. As beautiful as it was on the inside, filled with my mom’s tasteful furniture and our family photos in delicate silver frames, to me, it felt like a dreary little cloud of a place.

But moving out of that apartment completely unraveled me. Though I once quietly resented this place, I now treated it with church-like reverence, genuflecting in every holy corner. I was like an archeologist: each layer of items told a story of a phase in my family’s life over the last twenty years. Beloved or basic, the objects in the apartment became precious artifacts in a story that mostly exists in my mind now. With my mother gone, each coffee mug, Christmas wreath, and tube of lipstick felt like a fragile fossil I had to preserve to prove she existed. The apartment ceased being a place we lived the moment she died. Instantly, it became a towering museum, a toppling monument to my grief. An insurmountable mountain of stuff that I needed to memorialize and place behind glass so I could keep her alive through the things she touched.

I am, of course, talking about the small items. The inconsequential ephemera of the everyday: address books, old bottles of lotion, loose papers, the mismatched contents of the junk drawer. The big ticket pieces—the antique grandfather clock, the wedding china, the dining room table we never ate at—were split up for parts among the kids. Questions of who deserved what, who had the biggest house to accommodate the grandest items, who needed furniture the most, and the like, were discussed cooly and diplomatically. I didn’t want to lay claim to any of it. Moving the pieces of her life into our houses would mean dismantling the frozen diorama of her life. Besides, would having my mom’s silver flatware make her closer to me? If I keep her too-small cashmere sweaters in my closet, will I miss her less? Maybe owning the oak chest of drawers and the matching hutch would soothe the breathless ache in my lungs when I think about how I’ll never smell the mix of her perfume and Dove soap again.

But the tiny things, like the bobby pins and the nail files, are the hardest to toss. So I held onto her brush, her bathrobe. I kept her beloved glue gun and the ID card from her first job. I packed the rest in plastic and placed it in a storage unit, hoping that a future me, who didn’t feel like she was dying ten deaths daily, could figure out where to put it. It felt like suffocation. In the roar of her death, everything my mom once touched was alive to me, loudly talking about all the memories in a cacophony of non-stop sound. I could seal it up in boxes, but I’d still hear the muffled murmurs of our old life chatting away at me, babbling on beneath the bubble wrap and old newspaper.

I am still an archivist because movies and books rotted my brain, and now I see my life as a narrative story that I must curate through the pieces and pictures I keep and share. But every time I pack, and I move, and I make a home in some other collection of bare walls, I think back to the apartment, with its peeling yellow wallpaper and creaking floorboards. I think about how my mom isn’t hiding in the throw pillows or the decorative baskets above the sink. I think about how small it is to believe anyone’s world could be contained in their stuff, or the place they live. How wonderless to believe anything once breathing could be contained in something manufactured. I think about how I used each object to keep my mom close when she felt so far away and how, with every year that passes, her imprint on her items fades, but the lines in my face get deeper and more like hers.

All our things are just our things, and they’re not alive.