current music: The Mass Effect 3 OST playing in my mind in the quiet evening.

I take for granted how a house is full of strange memories. You have closets, drawers, shelves. There are boxes, folders, envelopes, bags. They all contain things. They can be papers from school, some you liked, some you never read. They can be old trinkets: gifts, keepsakes, things to help you remember.

I am in the house den. I was digging through the things because, like any video game enthusiast on a budget, I was looking for something old to install on my PC. From there, I'd fire up something old, just to help me pass the time. It's like reading an old book for me, these old games. The pixels and the sounds are what fill the imagination much like the pages of well-worn favorites.

In my sifting through the CD's, I saw old mixtapes I made from college. Some of them were from the plays I was directing for class. Others were backups of old favorite hip-hop tracks I picked up along the way. There were also DVD's mixed up with the audio CD's, some were old software copies that the publishers likely didn't remember anymore. Still others were CD's that hadn't even been opened up yet, likely bought off the shelf on discount and never given much attention to.

Our homes are like our minds. They house things we can't remember, or years we prefer to tune out and forget. We clean them out every now and then, re-evaluating the junk that piles up and discarding what we don't need. We upgrade, or we replace, or we augment what we have. Rarely we keep something past its need-due-date, unless it's especially old, or especially special. Or only if we have the space at home.

I'm starting to reflect that our family is fond of remembering. We have a largish house. There are lots of things we don't need. These things, we are too unwilling to part with. You wonder sometimes if the old arguments we had or old grudges we keep bringing up as a family reflect in our things. Like, every time you look at a row of encyclopedia books on a shelf, you remember the day you wanted to pound your five year old brother with them, or the time you look at a statue, you wonder if your teenage daughter and that boy she fancied was worth the restless shouting contest that kept the neighbors up.

And likewise, I wonder if people with smaller houses don't remember. I wonder if it's easier for them to let go of bad habits or bad memories. If they're less burdened by dusty, suffocating thoughts. If they're happier.