As some of you might already know, next month, B. and I will be moving into a house we’re about to officially purchase. Since we live in separate apartments, packing will be a complex issue that I’m only starting to face now. We’ve got a lot of stuff in double: some of it will be combined, some of it will go to the basement and, if I can help it, a lot of it will go straight to the trash can. I’m getting headaches just thinking about it.
You see, my beau is a P-R type, better known as the dreaded pack rat. He has a strange sentimental attachment to the weirdest objects and won’t let go of anything by fear of needing it sometimes down the road, and having to face the terrible, horrible fact that he threw the damn thing away. This applies to books he will never read, magazines he will never, ever look at again (anybody wants all the 1995 issues of Saturday Night Magazine ?), flyers for classes he will never take, clothes that are out of style, stolen spoons from airline companies and strings of all lengths and sizes.
B. has moved every two years or so since the beginning of his adult life, but since he hates packing, he waits to the very last minute and ends up dragging every single one of his possessions from apartment to apartment, without any kind of pre-selection. After his last move, I found a 10 year-old package of popcorn in a tin can in his fridge. He had taken that can of kernels with him on 5 different moves, without ever looking at the date on the box and with no true plan of ever eating the damn thing.
I, or the other hand, love empty space and freak out when I start realizing that I have too much stuff. My fridge always looks empty because I don’t keep food for very long and I love to see some negative space in my closets. We are planning to move into the house in about a month, so Sunday I sweet-talked B. into cleaning the content of his bedroom closet.
It would have made a perfect episode of the television show What Not to Wear, with B. modeling old clothes for me in front of the mirror and with us playing a tug of war game with some of his oldest pieces of clothing. The discarded pile grew high on the bed and I was starting to breathe better until we got to the t-shirt section.
Oh. My. God.
At first he was good about it, getting easily rid of a couple of plain white t-shirts that had turned yellow around the collar. But then we got to his « collection ». This was a geek’s paradise and my worst nightmare. Computer tradeshow t-shirts, software launch t-shirts, dead high tech company t-shirts… I kept finding them in every single corner of that closet. « We can’t get rid of this one! I wrote the software manual for it! » « You can’t make me throw away this t-shirt, it was in honor of our first beta testing. It’s a unique piece! »
I decided to count the t-shirts, just to make him realize how crazy this was. I stopped at 47 because the tears in my eyes kept me from finding any more of his « treasures ». « You’re a freak! », I said to him. « What am I getting myself into? » I couldn’t tell if the tears in my eyes were there because I was completely overwhelmed or because we were laughing so hard. Maybe it was just the dust coming out of the t-shirts he never wears.
In the end, he got to keep his damn t-shirts and we still took 3 very full bags of clothes to a local charity. I came back home, took a shower, and looked through my own closet to find something to wear. My eyes were drawn to the little pile of clothes B. keeps at my place. I looked through it and found 4 more t-shirts, 3 of them sporting computer related logos.
This must be true love or else I’m completely crazy.
