Bringing Order

Well it’s official, I am an adult. I cleaned my room and I enjoyed it! What has happened to me? This was no little tidying up either; this was the, “We’re pulling out the bed and vacuuming underneath,” sort of job, the, “Clearing out every drawer, and throwing out anything we don’t really need,” sort of project.

This last term in school there was no time to do anything, and I watched helplessly as my room became an unlivable mess. Once I was free of the pressures of finishing up the myriad of projects I had, I attacked the burgeoning chaos with a fury. And I felt helpless when on the second day I realized my room was a worse mess than when I had started.

You see, over the school term I accumulated a pile of ankle deep paper which I had shoved into a corner. About half of these papers were printouts of things I wrote for this blog, edited and marked by my untidy scrawl. The other half consisted mostly of school papers, some were even discovered to be from my late high-school days. And to add to the mess, my desk had become unusable as a small hill of books and letters and papers waited like dominos threatening an avalanche at the slightest breeze.

So, by the second day my floor was covered in stacks of papers without a footpath in sight. I sat dejected, surveying the mess I had created. When the papers had been shoved into a corner, they were mostly out of sight, and I could at least get from my bed to the door. Now, however, my room’s floor was peppered with stacks of short stories, junk, poems, essays, letters, and whatever else I found.

I could have just thrown everything away, or maybe I could have just stacked everything all back together again, but I wanted to do it right, to bring it all to order. As the day ended, I helplessly sat amid my still unfinished work. Realizing I wasn’t going to finish that night, I started moving the pages around until I was fairly certain I wouldn’t walk over them in my sleep. I went to bed defeated.

But as the sun arose—who are we kidding, I am on break—before it was noon, I got up and embraced the battle once more.

Now that my room is clean, it is really clean. I didn’t just throw everything out, I parsed through what was important and what was junk; I went the long way and succeeded. Maybe I’m making this sound grander than it really is, but I brought a little bit of order into my life. It feels good.