Room Sanity

One thing about living in the same place for too long, is that things tend to accumulate and clutter. Most humans tend to do this by retaining items that "will come in handy" one day, leading to an astounding accrual of useful yet hardly critical possessions.

I was only blessed by this enlightening insight when I watched the light rays enter my room this morning. It might have well been an optical illusion, but I swear I saw the light rays bend the moment they filtered in. Now, my faltering grasp of Physics reminded me that light only bends when it passes by a black hole, which is incidentally a concentration of super-dense mass.

My room might not have reached critical mass, but it damn well was going to. The suspicion that I had too much junk in my room was only reinforced by the quick calculation that I was currently actively using but 12% of the total floor space - junk enjoying a 99-year land lease on the remaining 88%.

Clearing up was much, much harder than I thought though, physically and emotionally.

Now, I am not a very sentimental person. I know just about when to stop rewatching the penultimate episode of Singapore Idol, when Daphne was still in the running, and come to terms with the fact that she just might have lost. But going through the stuff in my room... really was sapping.

Think of the junk in my room as kueh lapis, or for those less food-inclined, strata of sedimentary rock. The topmost pile of junk of course hailed from my recently-concluded army life, and once this was cleared, bringing light to parts of my room that had existed in darkness for 2 years, I found a layer of JC memorabilia. Council keepsakes, Track 'N Field letters of Buck-Up-You're-A-Lousy-Athlete, old Chemistry assignments I still haven't handed up.

Further on I plowed, digging deeper and deeper, all the while feeling like this was becoming too much like Jules Vernes' Journey.

I subsequently hit the Secondary School layer, finding Prefect badges, Chinese essays with more red ink (teacher's) than blue (mine), old copies of school cheers. And then I stopped, because my hands were shaking, and I could press on no more.

In one morning I had relived close to 8 years of the past. I had summoned memories of old friends, recounted moments of unbridled happiness and chastising sorrow, laughed over retrospectively-embarrassing follies, cherished and mourned my first kiss(es), endured pangs of regret for all the friends I've lost and the promises I've broken...

Finally, I had no choice but to grit my teeth and throw away as many things as I could bear. Real, hard thought had gone into it - there was simply no more space in my room for everything. Natural instinct bade me to hold on tight to everything, because they were irreplaceable, but things don't work like that.

Today, although I cleared tons of excess baggage, I spruced up my room enough to make way for the first signs that University is around the corner - two spanking new Law textbooks. Making way for the new, both physically and emotionally, is an oft overlooked yet crucial aspect of maintaining room sanity.

And, cliche as it may sound, life's a bit like that.