It’s July 2018.
We have just finished four days of packing up furniture. I have completed my last semester in Political Science and I am leaving the apartment that I lived in for the past four years.
It’s a nice spacious apartment. It is located in a quiet neighborhood between Ampelokipous and Panormou Street in Athens. It has a large hall, quiet bedrooms, and a beautiful living room where I will be spending most of my days either reading or writing. The landlady, strange and unreliable at first, proved to be kind, helpful, and battling her own difficulties after all.
I loved that place. It had a big bookcase in the living room, property of the landlady that I filled with books for four years. It was my first home away from home. My parents rented it for my brother and me since both of us were to be university students. I, doing my bachelor’s, and my brother doing his master’s. We lived together there for 3 years until he moved out to stay with his now wife.
The last year I lived there with my ex-girlfriend. It was filled with life and I only wish that I invited my friends over more often.
As we are watching the workers load the truck with our furniture I leave a note to the next people who are going to live here. In a way, I also leave a note to the house itself. A goodbye.
The truck is loaded and leaving. It’s destined for my hometown where we will take the furniture. I close the door and leave the keys inside. In about 10 minutes I will be crying in the car. My mom will say something to ease the tears while my brother and father, understanding how I am feeling, will tell her to stop and let me cry.
I grew as a person in that house. A lot. I fought with my brother about co-living habits, I laughed with my friends, took care of our dog, loved my exes, cried, stressed, panicked, and lived. As I closed the door to that house, I closed a big chapter of my life at the time. I think more or less, every student has felt this way for their first home. Or at least most university students in Greece.
Yet the point of this story is different. It is not about telling you about my first home in Athens. Not about my neighbors, my brother, or anything like that. It’s about realization.
As I already mentioned the furniture that my brother and I had in our apartment was brought to my hometown, Aigio. Some were stored in a storage and some were put in our family home. One of them was my brother’s bed. It would replace the well-maintained but old bunk beds that my brother and I slept on as kids. As a 22-year-old, preparing to leave for Cyprus to start a new chapter I paid little attention to my father’s remorse at replacing the beds.
When you are young, understandably, you want to change everything when you want to, paying little to no attention to how people around you feel or view things. For my dad, these two bunk beds were where his two sons slept every night. It is where he would come to kiss us and say goodnight to us. It’s where he would come to remember us growing up as we have now moved out of the house. He would probably remember all the years of struggles and the hassle of trying to raise us with Mom. I understood that, cerebrally, but I didn’t understand him.
Last month my brother got his kids’ bunk beds. 6 years older than me, and in many ways more sophisticated than I am he was much more reserved into replacing old furniture with new on a whim. I am sure, given the similarities with my dad, in 20 years he will be feeling the same way he did for those beds. It’s where he reads his kids’ bed stories every night to help them fall asleep. Where they can be most vulnerable and where he can spend some time watching over them in peace as our dad once did. These things matter.
As I am visiting my parents’ house this weekend I realize that the phrase I told my father ‘’It’s just things’’ was so myopic. Visiting my home now is so different since my mother is not with us anymore.
I find myself clinging to her things. The same way my dad did and does. I understand why now. While we as people, grow, leave, and naturally pass away these things remain. Sometimes these things are all we have of the people we love. Sometimes these things are the only things that allow us to connect with what we have lost. Sometimes it is the only way to transfer ourselves, even momentarily, at a time long gone with the people we wish were still in our life.
This story isn’t an ode to materialism. Not at all. I am still willing to change things on a whim if they have to be changed or replaced. But I am not so myopic anymore. Or at least I try not to be. No matter how much I think I understood back then, time and experience is something that one must spend, and go through to be able to really understand. That’s why we make things. That’s why we maintain them. That’s why we destroy them and that’s why we cherish and take care of them.
Things are an extension of ourselves and that is why the phrase ‘’it’s just things’’ is both correct and false. It’s so relative. Things have a meaning behind them and as all ‘’things’’ should be treated with the respect they deserve. By extension, we respect the person behind them. In a world that purchases things and changes them as fast as we do maybe this topic also needs to be added to the list of things we need to be more mindful of.
I guess that’s part of growing up. It’s a part of becoming more mature.
I guess it’s also a way to deal with grief. Another way in which grief makes you realize.
Speaking of mindfulness, there is another thing that this story has made me more conscious of. My time with my brother at that apartment. I had that realization for a long time now but it’s worth sharing.
Our three years of living together were the time were we really became brothers. For the first time. The second was when we realized how serious our mother’s condition was.
As I mentioned there’s a 6-year gap between us. This is a large gap that could lead to many siblings being very different and not very close. Spending a lot of time together, having a lot of fun, quite a few fights but most importantly being there for one another was what really solidified our relationship.
The realization is also that this was a time we will not have again. He has a family of his own and as often as I see them, we as 18 and 24-year-olds will never come again. So aside from ‘’things’’ it is also a good time to remind myself and potentially you reading this to cherish the moments with people. I like to think that I do, a lot.
But a reminder is never a bad thing. At least in most cases.
Marios
P.S.: The bunk beds were not thrown into the trash. They were given to my young cousin where she sleeps every night.
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