Stuff'n'Things

In a life-limbo, thinking about our stuff, what it means, and what we can bring with us when we go

I often fantasize about the kind of home that can accommodate all of our potential selves, about closets that can hold everything from shearling snow boots to flip flops and opera pumps. About a library that holds all of the rereads we refer back to, everything underlined, dogeared, and annotated with our previous revelations, conversations with ourselves in the marginalia — along with everything we are in process with at the present, the nightstand stacks, and the research, the rabbit holes, and the lures toward whatever might haunt and entangle our imaginings next.

I fantasize about walls that hold our collections of stuff, souvenirs of our experiences, scars from our adventures, walls that reverberate with the echoes of their stories, told at raucous volume to a dinner party or in cups at late hours. I fantasize, I guess, about a fantastical, profound home like something out of Borges — infinite in its capacity and its personality, its meaning.