About 13 years ago, I decided to leave Chicago and intentionally “forgot” a full suitcase at my uncle’s house in Evanston. He had this huge house with a sprawling basement that resembled some kind of ancient catacomb, and I only had a couple arms and one train ticket. So I left my big, green suitcase in a dark, quiet corner where it wouldn’t be any trouble to anyone while I was away.
About seven years later, that old suitcase ended up at my parents’ house. My aunt and uncle found it somewhere in that underground labyrinth, loaded it in the car, and dropped it off at my mom and dad’s house on the way to their cabin.
When I left that suitcase in Evanston, I didn’t really have a plan. But the timeline for when I would finally retrieve the 150-pound bag was in flux.
Then two years after that, the old, green suitcase finally made its way back to its proper owner via my parents’ Subaru. It sat outside in our messy garage for about a year until my wife finally implored me to take it downstairs to the basement, which I did. Now it’s sitting in my office, a few feet away, staring at me, waiting for its next stop.
Do not reply
That green suitcase is probably about 150 pounds. I haven’t opened it since the last time I zipped it up 13 years ago, so I’m not sure exactly what it contains. It’s been so long. I think it might be sheet music. What else would be so heavy? Bricks? Sure, but I wasn’t a mason or a bricklayer. I was a musician.
That green suitcase is kind of like an email. You know the kind I am talking about. The email that you get, but you don’t open. Or maybe you do open it, but you don’t respond. You tell yourself that you’re going to respond later when you have a moment to sit down and think, or maybe tomorrow morning after you eat breakfast.
But you don’t respond later that night, and you don’t respond the next morning either. You don’t respond the day after that, the week that comes next, or the month around the corner, and the longer you wait, the harder it gets. You forget about the email for weeks at a time, and then you remember it all of a sudden and kind of secretly wish it would just sort of fade away.
Bachelor’s baggage
That green suitcase is like the box of crap from college: old papers, T-shirts, Nokia cell phones, hard drives, fake IDs, the old textbooks you never read, and everything that reminds you of your stupid, cringe-inducing youth.
That box follows you from one apartment to the next, to your bedroom, to your basement office, to your storage facility, to the attic above the garage. You don’t want the stuff anymore, you don’t even want to go through it, you don’t want to see it(!), but disposing of it somehow feels wrong. “I can’t just throw it away,” you mumble to yourself as you put off sorting though that box for another six months.
That green suitcase is like all the junk in your basement that just keeps adding up. Every year, the stacks of boxes get a little higher and the floor space a little smaller. You tell yourself you’re finally going to get the basement clean, that all you have to do is get a bunch of this stuff out and off to Goodwill, and once that’s done, it’s going to be nice down there. But you don’t do it. Spring cleaning comes and goes, and the basement heap grows.
We’ve all got the emails, the boxes, and the junk that we just don’t have the heart, or time, to address. Logically, we know it would be easier to take care of everything the first moment we think to do it, but we don’t. Going through old things is hard in a way that we don’t want to admit. We don’t want to be forced to confront what it is that we’ll be throwing away, if we are to be throwing it away. So we just let it sit.
Photo by John Moore/Getty Images
Facing the music
When I left that suitcase in Evanston, I didn’t really have a plan. I wasn’t leaving it for good, or at least not intentionally. But the timeline for when I would finally retrieve the 150-pound bag was in flux. I didn’t really have a need for whatever was in it, and I didn’t think about my plan to get it back. I just wanted to leave, so that’s what I did.
I’m sure that when I finally open it one of these days, I’ll find that old sheet music. Etudes, solos, and various studies. I’ll find my old handwriting, some from my professors too, ones I should have kept in touch with better and ones I haven’t thought about since I was a kid. I’ll sit there on the floor, and I’ll remember all the things I haven’t remembered in so long.
I’ll think of my younger years and smile, and then I’ll be forced to decide what I want to do with the yellowing sheet music laying on the blue-and-white carpet in my office. I won’t be able to throw it out. I know that. Who throws out music anyway? My dad never did, and then I used his. Maybe my kids will use mine? Or maybe that’s what I’ll tell myself so I don’t have to throw it out. I’ll take it all and put it back in that big, green suitcase not knowing when I’ll see it again.
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