It started with a class project.

Truthfully, it started with a trip to Europe in the summer of 1994–between my junior and senior years of high school–because if not for that trip, I wouldn’t have had any pictures to put into the photo albums. Making it a scrapbook with a specific narrative, however, came about because I was taking Mrs. Taber’s humanities class and since it was my last semester of high school, it was the easiest final project option. Four years later, I’d not only kept the project, but I’d also added to it and filled up five photo albums.

These photo albums are among the many things that moved with me over the years and ruing our time in our current house, have sat at the bottom of a leaning bookshelf. With the exception of times when someone posted “Show a picture from when you were __” to social media, I had not flipped through them in years, and when my wife took over the office for her job, we rearranged the bookcases and put the albums on the floor of the guest room. They sat there–getting moved to a different spot on the floor every once in a while–until I decided that there had to be a better way of storing five years’ worth of pictures. Finding a permanent space was more like shifting clutter from one location to another and scanning them was a task I just didn’t have the time or energy for.

What if I consolidated them?

It was an easy task on its surface: I would take the albums apart, keep the pages that were usable, and then curate the photo collection so that the photos were exactly what I wanted. I know if I worked at it, I could whittle all of that down to to albums.

Of course, easier said than done.

For one thing, the pages I was working with were decades old self-adhesive pages and in many cases, I had taped the photos into the albums, so I had to not only take the pictures out but I had to peel rolled up Scotch tape off the back of each photo. Once that was done, I could start by deciding what to keep and what to throw away, which was another challenge in itself.

I’d read more than a few stories about hoarders who had a very hard time letting go of certain objects in their houses, especially when some objects had a story attached to them. Whenever I comb through my box full of high school and college memorabilia, I always come across some sort of random object that I kept because it reminded me of a certain day or time in my life. You’ve seen a few of them on this blog: senior award medal and cords, certificates of achievement, the flower from a homecoming float. Well, these scrapbooks were full of that.

One of the original requirements for Mrs. Taber’s album project was that I had to have some sort of written element. So in the albums that contained my senior year of high school, I wrote accompanying text pieces, which were small essays about a particular event. It might have been how i felt about a particular place I visited, or it might have been a story about making out with a girl from France or how I felt about my girlfriend. I wish i could tell you what led me to being so personal in what I was writing–maybe I felt I couldn’t really talk to my parents so I was confiding in a teacher or maybe the world? Who knows. But years later, those mini-essays would write an essay for my old blog, one that I re-posted to Pop Culture Affidavit in 2014.

In fact, combing through my memories of that last year of high school was way more pleasant than I thought it was going to be and many of the pictures I discarded were of poor quality (over-exposed, my thumb was on the camera lens, etc.), were duplicates or too similar to others in the album (how many shots of the Eiffel Tower does one photo album need?), or were boring (wow, that’s a lot of pictures of the walls of a Spanish castle). I’ve always said that my senior year of high school was weird and that I was all over the place, especially since i seemed to be trying to make up for three years of a lack of a social life during 10 months (something I’d repeat my first semester of my sophomore year of college when I made up for all the drinking I didn’t do freshman year). But now it’s more amusing than anything. Even the two pictures of me with my old girlfriend (whom I wrote about in a previous entry), which were the only two I had left, brought back some pleasant feelings.

But when it came to pictures of my college years, I had a tougher time with the memories. In nearly 25 years, I have not attended a Loyola alumni event, and the last time I was on the campus was about 20 years ago when I happened to be in that part of Baltimore and decided to kill a summer afternoon by wandering around. The reason I have such trouble with those years is all of the baggage that I still carry regarding relationships and friendships during those years. It’s something I’ve talked about with my therapist, of course, but what it boils down to is that I spent a lot of my youth chasing acceptance in one form or another, especially from groups of guys (I’ve never had any problems being friends with girls or women). The result is that I allowed myself to be treated poorly and bet the butt of many jokes. I also blamed myself for not being able to take a joke (which was a favorite refrain from those who pulled jokes on me). So as I flipped through three albums’ worth of college pictures, my mind drifted from what happened that night or in that moment to something shitty someone did or said. Sometimes, I didn’t even have to remember because I’d actually printed a caption on an Avery label and stuck it in the album next to the picture.

So in case you’re keeping track, I was so desperate for belonging to a group (or a “crew”, which was one of my father’s favorite terms) that i allowed myself to be treated like shit. then, I chronicled that in a scrapbook so when I pulled those photos out 25 years later I could be triggered and relive events/feel feelings I thought I was over. Plus, some of those Avery labels were stuck to the pictures and that means that I have to get sticker detritus off of the pictures I want to keep.

I’m a friggin’ genius.

On the bright side, I see pictures of people with whom I was friends and whose presence doesn’t trigger something rotten. Plus, few of the pictures suggest anything than: everyone was a clueless moron in college, and we should all keep thanking God that social media didn’t exist in the late Nineties. That helps because it widens my view of that time and reminds me that I don’t have to be confined to bad memories of toxic people and that college was actually much better than I remember. I’m still skipping next year’s reunion, though.

Finally, there’s the memorabilia. Because a scrapbook isn’t just photos, it’s things you grabbed or things that serve at markers from those times. A number of the pieces of memorabilia were the things I guess you’d expect that I’d kept: a brochure from the program that ran my trip to Europe, postcards from places that had better photography than I coudl ever take, a couple of coasters from bars I’d visited, prom tickets, and graduation announcements. But then there’s the truly random crap, like:

An acceptance certificate to USC. I may have mentioned this in my post about applying to college, but when I got into the University of Southern California, they not only sent me an acceptance letter, but a certificate. I obviously didn’t go there, but I thought it was weird enough that I kept it and put it in the scrapbook.

The ashes of a poem I wrote. I wrote this terrible poem about a breakup where I compared the relationship to the act of vomiting. The next girl I dated (who is the old girlfriend I mentioned earlier) hated it. I mean, really hated it. In fact, she hated it so much that she literally set a copy on fire and put the remains in a Ziploc bag, which she then gave to me. Whenever I would show this to people, they would often say something like “Oh God, what a psycho”, but I found it funny and still do.

The test book for my AP tests and the admission tickets to the SAT. Yeah, I have no idea why I kept these. Did I really need to commemorate the AP bio exam?

My senior year parking pass. This had been taped to the rear window of my old Hyundai Excel and I’d paid $250 to have it so that i could part in the lot behind my senior year dorm instead of taking a shuttle to a satellite lot. I got told repeatedly how impractical I was being even though I wanted to pay a premium for the convenience of parking. Unless, that is, I was being asked to give someone a ride and then catching shit when I said “no.” Like I said, the most innocuous of things from those years brings up something rotten.

As a closer here, I have to mention that as I wrote the first draft of this sentence, “Bookends” by Simon and Garfunkel came on my record player. It was a total coincidence because I’d simply been listening to The Concert in Central Park. But the sentiment in that song is simple and it’s perfect. So it winds up being a perfect note to end on. Because so much of what I’ve got here is fleeting and accepting that there’s been life beyond it while still deciding what’s worth keeping is all you can do.