the fish epic

In the very-bottom-basement of my building, past the parking stalls, is a storage area with individual lockers for tenants to stash their crap. The area is cool and dark and, barring the random flood, fairly secure. Measuring at roughly 36 cubic feet, it allows for stashing quite a bit of crap.

With M moving in slowly in the past month, being “cramped” is an understatement. The closet — the huge but damnably inefficient closet! — is full again in spite of massive purging. Two boxes of summer clothes await to go into storage, with several more piles of unwanted/unneeded clothes sitting in the hallway, waiting to be given away.

Up until recently I haven’t made much use of the basement locker; what I used to leave down there were so unused that I probably should have tossed them instead of storing them. A few months ago, when his moving-in was only some eventuality set some time in the future, M helped me put in shelves and organised/threw out a lot of junk. Which is incredible foresight for this weekend, because we managed to fill up half the locker. That’s 18 cubic feet of crap.

Even still, the influx of belongings took me a little by surprise — after all, M has been living out of this flat, practically speaking, for many months. It was a bit of wake-up call to the fact that M also owns things! Things such as some beautiful cups and bowls, tons of artwork, a full set of pots and pans and a whole lot of baking implements.

The quest to find a place for everything have not been easy. M’s driven by the need to put things away; I’m driven by the need to give them away. He wants more shelves, I want to make do with the existing shelves. I firmly believe that we can live without the things that we can’t fit into this apartment. It could mean that I have to give up the chance of having a wok, but when I already have a frying pan AND a grill pan (which I haven’t used since I reduced meat consumption), how often am I really going to use that wok?

So the purging continues. I’m considering putting some of my sweaters away until next year (or what I call “pseudo-purging”), since I have quite a few. That way, perhaps at the end of this season, some of them will be worn down enough to warrant tossing out. Did you know that I have never tossed out a single sweater, due to its condition? I have grown too large for some older sweaters, but I’ve never, until this week, tossed any out due to being too crummy. It wasn’t until I examined all of them with a more critical eye that I realised how pile-y some of them have become. Good-by, turtle-neck sweater dress! I wish I threw ye out last winter!

I’m glad that at least, from now on, our locker won’t be storing this sort of crap year after year. Anyway, back to purging so I can make room in my life for the things I do love.