Old Things

Broken bicycles, old busted chains
With rusted handle bars, out in the rain
Somebody must have an orphanage for
All these things that nobody wants any more.

-Broken Bicycles, TOM WAITS

I’d been planning to clean my room but then I was dying to watch all the TV series I failed watch during the review and the bar exam. Now that I finished all the complete season three of Rome and Lost, season one of Heroes and Criminal Minds and season six of 24, I thought it was time.

My room is virtually a mouse hole: cramped and cluttered. Yes, I have a Ph. D. in Burara-ness. I am that type person who leaves the toothpaste uncapped, does not lift the toilet seat when I take a leak and leaves jeans I peeled off on the floor. Our maid long ago gave up cleaning after she declared unilaterally that my room was in perpetual state of calamity. In her words: Diyos ko po! Parang dinaanan ng bagyo!

So I have to live with the chaos I have created and pretend it’s an artist‘s room. I have learned to love the stench of the old and crisp pages of books I have hunted for in book sales piled in one corner, and reek of the stacks of photocopy reading materials littered in another corner. In a cluttered room like mine, looking for things is always a daunting task. So, I would wait for them to resurface.

You see I have unconsciously adapted my mother’s habit of storing things I no longer need thinking that I would need them someday: I save plastic bags, empty bottles, boxes, old notebooks even scratch papers and empty cases of ball pens. Like my mother who lived during difficult times, I am obsessed with the idea that I will need them one day. Imagine then all the junk I have in my room. It could be a haven for scavengers.

And so, armed with broom, vacuum cleaner I borrowed from a friend and garbage bin, I launched cleaning.

I never thought I would embark into an archaeological excavation. I have made some surprising discoveries.

I found keys, school ID’s, ball pens and highlighters, raffle tickets, receipts I had been looking. I found what appeared to be socks with some life form sprung from it! I unearthed a few coins no longer in legal tender. I found the book I have been looking for: Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (I have been planning to read this book; it’s a shame that to this day I haven’t read it yet). I found my first issue of FHM, Flip magazine and my Tera Patrick video collection.

I half expected that I could find the Holy Grail or the lost tribe of Israel under my bed.

I uncovered my journal I kept more than ten years back. I took some time to read, but I cringe at the drivel I wrote in my desperate attempts to create pretentious prose.

Consider this blood-curdling line in one of my entries: Her trail kept on lingering in my deepest self. How I wish I could go to her shrine to cradle her flowers and worship her divine grace.

And this coma-inducing line in what supposed to be a poem: How I wish I could accost thou to echo you my shimmering maxims/ and together we’ll sing the melody of our dreams/

I know… I know… please stop laughing now. I was only sixteen and obviously under throes of first love. I was groping for words that may rhyme with dreams and the nearest word I could think of is maxims. And I thought the adjective shimmering is a beautiful word.

I digress. It took me forever to clean my room. I cleaned my closet, furnitures my shelf discarding all the things I no longer need.

The clutter translated into two large cardboard boxes filled with junk.

To throw or not to throw those junk. Now, this is my problem. The boxes have been lying there under my closet but I could not make self to dispose of them. I could not figure out what to do with them. You see, I am closet romantic person. True, I no longer need them. True, all the stuff in the box are junk. But the junk is ME.

I could not just throw all these things: The old and weathered leather boots given by my brother, faded and worn-out black shirt which my bro bought for me in a street in Prague,dilapidated and busted Swiss watch from my sister, letters from my father, cards from relatives, albums I bought: The Cure, Live, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Sarah McLachlan and Alanis Morrisette (in cassette tapes!), intricately decorated and customized mug from my girl friend, empty lighters and key chains from my good friends, even pebbles from Palawan and Sagada given to me, belt and already worn-out back pack given by my best friend back in college etc..

I don’t know… there is poetry in those old things… wrapped with profound meanings…I could not just throw it away.

Or maybe I have been watching too much movies these days.