Purloined

I used to keep things. I couldn't bear to get rid of anything, so I kept everything. I associated some emotional memory with these objects and so they would stay right where they were.

I didn't understand how people could get rid of something. At one time, I had two stacks of USA Todays in my bedroom; I mean, I paid for them, why would I get rid of them? Actually, I didn't pay for them, the subscription was a gift from my sister, and that's why I couldn't get rid of them.

I think that came from a time when me and another boy were looking for something to destroy, and I proffered up some toy that didn't seem to be in use. Carefully, he asked me if it had been a Christmas gift? Yes, it had. With all the reverence a child could muster, he told me you could never destroy Christmas gifts, and so I applied that to gifts in general ever since.

At one point, I would keep the plastic wrapper that my Wizard magazines would come in, carefully inserting the periodical back into it, along with all the subscription cards that would flutter out of them. I didn't think of this as a problem, I only thought, why doesn't everyone do this?

There were two incidences that I remember that were key in bringing down my wall of hoarding. For the first, I was sitting in a journalism class and the professor was talking about the transience of news, the point being how quickly news becomes old. Then he said, "After all, people don't keep newspapers, unless, you know, they're crazy." I wonder if my mouth went dry.

The second incidence occurred when I was reading an Avenger's comic. Tony Stark had invited Steve Rogers over for dinner, but before they begin to eat Tony says something like, "Well, if I would have known I'd be having you over, I would have kept all that WWII Captain America memorabilia. My first reaction was: Why would you get rid of all that stuff anyway? My second reaction, admittedly a little slower to come around, was: Why am I getting upset about this?

Since then I've enjoyed a kind of catharsis in getting rid of things. To be sure, I still keep quite a bit, comics, books and the like. But I'm getting better.

That's why I understood why Mr. Entroop was so upset. A few days ago something of his came up missing. What, I don't know.

I had seen him talking to the people at O.A.D.S. across the hall, which was odd (he usually keeps to himself) but I didn't think much of it. All I'd ever gotten from him was a curt nod, so I wasn't too concerned with the haggered look he had been parading around recently. Soon enough it got around that his office down the hall had been broken into, which began a cursory examination of our own. But, it didn't seem that whomever had broken in had much interest in reams of paper or discarded coffee cups.

We all wondered what it could have been that the intruder was after, and considering the way Mr. Entroop was acting, something was missing. Then I began to wonder why he hadn't been over to ask anyone here? Did he somehow suspect us?

Or maybe, because of how many times I had to get the master key from the super to get into our offices, he didn't think we were all that competant.