Your Old Room

by John Saward

Here are all your retired sweaters, your D-list T-shirts, the jackets you bought with ambitions of becoming a Different Guy. Here is your dad’s old rec league hockey jersey, here is a slate grey dress shirt with this very strange and near-reflective sheen, which you wore to a bar in Hoboken one night after college, an almost repellent sheen honestly, but on that night you were a man with a big evening laid out in front of you and you were happy to wear it. All of it is in there, this mausoleum for all the different past versions of yourself, dumped in here between apartments. 

Here is an Albert Belle bobblehead and an Albert Belle action figure, here is a Rodney Hampton rookie card, here is possibly every piece of Albert Belle memorabilia ever made, in fact, each of which you can now see failed in capturing his simmering, remorseless brand of beefed-up sluggery. Here is the empty bottle of Mionetto that you bought for the 20-year anniversary of the bar where you worked, that you drank out of a little plastic cup with everyone who was in there while the sneering, trudging old grouch who owned the bar watched us and seemed to be having a rare and brief but genuinely nourishing moment. 

Here is a post-it your mom left you about going to the grocery store, back in a little while, which you kept just to remember what her handwriting looks like, and a photo your dad took of the dining room with the midday sun coming in through the back windows, a particular atmosphere you associate with a forbidden kind of leisure and freedom, home “sick” from school at 3:00 p.m. in an empty house.