A Day in the Life of a Hoarder

I had never really considered myself a hoarder until it was pointed out to me. I wouldn't say my condition's extreme but an average day of mine possibly indicates a slight inclination towards it. Here's an example of such a day.

The day kicked off on a bad note when I woke up to find the help moping the floors clean with the tattered remains of my favourite, five-year-old T-shirt. Yes, I was aware that time had left several holes on the fabric already but it was just so comfortable and had served so well, it surely didn't deserve such fate.

Packing my bag for class was another drudgery. It took up a considerable amount of time to sift through the leaflets random strangers distributed in front of my college every day and make room for my books. I had to make sure my mother wasn't around because if she saw the mess inside the bag, she would throw them away and while I was quite certain I wasn't going to buy a TV any time soon or move in with a newly married couple in an apartment in Tongi, I couldn't just dump the effort someone put behind making those leaflets in the dustbin. 

My teacher had already started his lectures by the time I joined class, and I spent an entire ten minutes trying to find a pen with some ink left in it among the twenty something pens in my bag. The girl who sat next to me and was always secretly jealous of my pen 'collection' flashed me a smug smile as she realised that not one of them worked and I had to bite my dignity and borrow one from a friend.

I chose to walk back home from class since I couldn't decide whether I should spend the only shiny, new 100 taka note I had in my purse on a rickshaw ride or not. I bought an ice-cream on the way and slipped the ice-cream stick in my pocket when I had finished eating it. One of these days, I was going to make one of those fancy pen holders with ice-cream sticks but that day was not today. Today it found itself with the others I had been saving for I did not remember how long.  

When I got to composing this article, I felt slightly intimidated by the number of untitled documents cluttering my desktop. They were all the first few drafts of previous articles and assignments. The final versions were in a separate folder but I kept the drafts, in case I ever wanted to compare the versions. My inbox was in a similar state with thousands of mails, varying from slightly important to you've-won-10k-dollars spam mails that I could have deleted but didn't for future purposes still unknown to me.

When I retired to bed at the end of the day, I craved for some good music and sought for my earphones which I had left in my study table's drawer. I made a mental list of the things that could possibly be inside it-more leaflets, unimportant papers, more ice-cream sticks, pen caps, and other things that move- and decided to go to sleep instead. I was just not ready to face the drawer. Not yet.