Accumulator

I have done this twice before in my life – bid a painful farewell to a store of memories. Perhaps I dwell too much in the past sometimes, but I like my memories.  And I like mementos, the physical artefacts that become bound up with memories and help us to evoke them. Hence, I never like to throw anything away. When my father died and my mother moved into a smaller house, I had to perform triage on all the stuff I'd had stored in their garage for years.  There were dozens of boxes and garbage sacks full of it – mostly a record of my college days: every party invitation, every reproving note from my tutors, every message that had ever been pinned to my door; a montage of missed rendezvous and misfiring love affairs; a hoard of memories.  And I had to throw them all away. When my mother died shortly after I moved to China, I no longer had anywhere to store my possessions (and they were too many for me to afford to ship them here).  Some of the more valuable things (my vinyl record collection, my hi-fi) I lodged with friends; others (a video recorder, a couple of small TVs) I gave away.  A great deal just had to be taken to the town garbage dump.  Worst of all, the fruits of a lifetime's book-buying had to be abandoned – none of the secondhand bookstores in the area could be bothered to collect them, and even my old school library declined them as a gift.  More than a thousand titles thrown away, each of them a memory of childhood or adolescence.  Heart-breaking. And now I've just had to do it again.  I've moved into a smaller apartment this week, and spent the last several days packing – or throwing superfluous items away.  For me, though, it's difficult to treat anything as "superfluous"; even something with absolutely no utility may still be drenched in memories.  I had, for example, nearly complete sets of the main Beijing expat listings magazines going back seven years, dozens of 'nightlife' maps (a couple of which I've kept as interesting historical documents - how many bars were there around Houhai in spring of '03??), and flyers and posters for just about every gig I've ever been to (and a fair few I didn't go to).  It was quite a wrench even to let go of items as trivial and worthless as these.  I fear I have hung on to far too many of them still: I have something like 45 boxes to unpack at my new place.  The packing took me 50 hours; I am afraid the unpacking might take 500.