My room is exactly sixteen feet by sixteen feet; I took an old tape measure to each wall just to be sure. No, I wasn’t reading House of Leaves again, but was trying to get a sense of just how much space I take up. You see, everything I own, outside of my motorcycle, fits in that room. My entire life is crammed into a sixteen by sixteen room.

I started cataloguing the things I own, making a list of every material possession, ranked by its utility. If it served no immediate purpose, I tossed it. Most of what existed in that room is now comfortably hidden away inside a dumpster, awaiting a garbage truck to take it away to its final resting place at the city landfill. Old comic books, posters, little trinkets and nick nacks that I picked up god knows where were all purged with little thought or hesitation. Only what I felt I needed made the cut.

There’s my old mattress and even older set of box springs, a gift from my parents to commemorate my first apartment. I moved out of that apartment several years back and rarely think about it now. There’s a slate grey filing cabinet that I picked up when I decided I was a real adult. It’s beginning to rust now, its gunmetal body losing its fight to the iron oxide like an old person often loses their fight with cancer. I’ll have to toss it soon, but for now it still serves a purpose. There’s the wooden desk I stole from an old professor. Stole might not be the right word; he was getting rid of it, and I offered to take it off his hands. I only keep it because I need a place to let my laptop rest. It’s five years old now, my laptop, and I’m only holding onto it until I can think of a proper way to get rid of it. Throwing it into the dumpster just seems cruel for an object so near and dear to my heart. There’s the turquoise bicycle without a front tire, a relic from when I was still an active individual. I just can’t bring myself to toss it, not yet, because it connects me with friends long gone. There’s a single twenty-five pound dumbbell, its partner lost somewhere in the several moves that led me here, another reminder of a once athletic past. There’s a half empty bottle of expensive Scotch, liquid testament to my on-again-off-again alcoholism. There’s a crumpled pack of cigarettes, several smokes still encased inside, likely stale. There’s fourteen days’ worth of clothing, all practical. None of my old band t-shirts made the cut.

Those are the only things I still own, and I can’t help but think that these possessions are nothing more than a collection of broken things.

It’s fitting that I would collect brokenness. After cataloguing my scant belongings, I began to look at myself. Two busted up shoulders; a bum knee; a fucked up ankle; two tar-lined lungs; a liver just shy of cirrhosis; yellow teeth; a crooked nose; scar tissue on my hands, my feet, my forearms; a broken heart; a shattered mind. I am just a collection of broken things.

I’m leaving all this shit behind, my mattress and filing cabinet, my laptop and desk, my bicycle. The bottle of Scotch will remain on the desk, accompanied by the cigarettes. The clothing I’m keeping, stowed it all away in a green canvas bag I don’t remember procuring. My old injuries and afflictions I can’t get rid of, my still-bleeding heart a burden I want desperately to just drop in the dumpster with all the rest. If only we could throw away our scars.

These few items are all I have, and I’m not taking a single one. They will stay here, in this sixteen by sixteen room until someone removes them, a mute museum to the damaged man who used to live here. Nobody will care for these small monuments, not even me. And that’s the way it should be.

I’m leaving my broken things in this room, leaving and never coming back. It’s time to start a new collection.