I’ve spent the last few weeks clearing out my Uncles, and grandmothers, house. Nan was moved into a nursing home a few years ago, and Uncle Murray stayed living at her house.

We’ve nearly finished, the house is settling in a week or so, but it has been a really interesting experience.

Lots of people have said, ‘oh, it must be pretty sad’, I’m not sure if I’m lying to myself, because, it really isn’t. I don’t find old cups and chairs particularly sad, if anything it has been another unwanted stress in my already stressful life.

Mum does not feel the same way. Underline, bold, italics. Capitals. Fireworks.

We’ve inherited a room full of junk, but do not have a room to house it. Our house is absurd at the moment, Mia’s bedroom still has a treadmill in it, and she has toys for days.

But all of these ‘things’ mean something. To mum. Potentially to Mia. Supposedly to me.

I have a lot of stuff. A lot of useless stuff.

My belongings aren’t me though. My collection of handwritten letters to my high school best friends, and often enemies, do not define me, so why do I still have them?

I have pictures and autographs and collections of things that, mean so little in the scheme of things. They don’t tell my story. But when I’m dead, will people look to them to tell my story? To provide closure? To heal wounds?

I don’t know. I don’t want it. Throw it out. Burn it with me.

It’s generally at this point of my internal dialogue on the matter, that I wonder whether I’m having some form of mid-life crisis.

Maybe. It would make sense I guess. It just sounds like another situation I’d have to handle though, so let’s skip having one for the time being.

So, I ask myself. The important question in all of this I guess. Will this mean something to Mia?

Will these pictures of her dad and mum, alive and well, and happy, help her when she’s older? Will the cup her mum brought my Nan, help her?

There are these old pictures of my grandparents, black and white and on their wedding day, they’re cool I guess. I don’t know them though, I don’t know their story, or what drove them, or the jokes they were telling each other as the photographer snapped the picture.

It doesn’t tell me anything. I know nothing about their parents, or even what it was like for them. Two young married people who left Egypt in the 50s, baby in tow, hop on a boat and land in a foreign country.

Isn’t that what matters though? Isn’t it the stories and the lives they led that make them real?

I’ll never know what it was like for them. And let me tell you something, after cleaning through their belongings; the belongings of 4 deceased people, 1 elderly lady and 1 child, I’m no closer to knowing these things. I don’t feel closer to them, or understand them any better.

If anything, I question their judgement and wish that instead of spending time buying shit that would eventually land in some spare room or the tip, that they told their stories. Good, bad, crazy. All of it. That means something. That means more than a fucking ugly tea set.

And as my mother clings to these things, these items that mean so little to me, but so much to her, I look around my room and my house and wonder about what my loved ones will find sentiment in after I’m gone.

Will it be the hundreds/thousands of pictures I’ve taken over the years? Will it be those god-awful letters? My comic book collection?

Will they be able to paste them altogether and pretend I’m still there?

Or will someone be bitching about how annoying it is to go through so much junk, that means so little to them?

I am not my belongings.