Full of Overwhelm

How do you clean your room when it's full of overwhelm? When you're standing in the only clean three by four foot corner, by the door, starring at box stacks? Slowly, slowly. When you have to jump into bed, over the trench of What's In That Pile and the chasm of Piled, Probably Dirty Clothes.

See, The Great Floor Divide between The Dirty and The Clean, Set On An Old Comforter has long broken down. The gap bridged and the categories mixed. I guess it all has to be washed again now.

You don't want to buy a dresser, you're not—weren't, anyway—planning to stay here long. Furniture is a wasted cost when you plan to leave it all behind. To throw everything you care about, a box or three, into your grand marquis and drive straight to Seattle.

So you make a box dresser. A Lowe's Heavy Duty Medium Masterpiece. Tape the top, cut the side open, but leave a border for rigidity.

It kind of works. You use it as you use furniture: with haphazard. The top collects things, naturally, as it lives too-close to the door to open fully. The inside gets things thrown into it, quite literally, to get off the floor.

It's a too-small room. Approximately two and a half by one and a half yous. Approximately too small by too small.

You rotated the bed once. It was an all day effort. You cleared the room of what you could without clogging your apartments hallway too bad. You don't want you roommate to hate you. Two bins, some boxes made it to the hall. The desk and side-table with a laptop and three hard drives stayed. The mattress left. Through a shear force of will you rotated the bed, slowly, hitting every single wall. Rotate, hit the wall, push it a bit to get more angle, move the side table, rotate, move the desk, push, side-table, rotate, push, rotate, desk, side-table, rotate. You fight through this war until this too goddamn big bed is perpendicular to how it was.

The room is too small. But mostly the bed is too big and she has too much goddamn stuff in here. Book Mountain, box full of jackets, technology and computer nonsense she doesn't need. It occupies the closet, the floor. She wants to get rid of it, but it's full of overwhelm.

Right, that's where we were.

She's sitting on her bed, charging her phone. There's a dresser of boxes to her right, moved from their prior home. Recently, a Dried Cat Vomit Discovery was made under the bed. She refuses to think of how long it's been there, but knows she has to clean it up.

Her desk is small, too small, but too big for the room. It's not enough to fit a monitor on with a laptop in front.

A too small desk, a too big bed, and a not enough room. Full of overwhelm.