Article by Margalit Goldberg Art by Zoe Harrington
This is an ode to places where things don’t have a place. An ode to my messy girls, the ones who aren’t afraid to take up space. And an ode to the people who love them for and despite of it. Us messy girls let ourselves and our things float and get lost and be found again when they’re something entirely new. We are the people who feel more comfortable being out of place and not letting others decide where we should go.
It is easier to keep track of myself and my belongings when they are scattered about for the world to see. When clothes are worn once but not dirty enough to be put in a hamper to be washed, the obvious solution is to leave them on the floor of my room until I wear them again. When I need to find something at the bottom of a bag, it makes the most sense to dump the whole thing out. A junk drawer is a necessary part of any space I inhabit.
I used to be anxious whenever I lost something. I would panic and violently tear apart my room until I found it. If I didn’t come across it buried under my t-shirts, stuffed into a dresser drawer, or under my sheets at the bottom of my bed, I’d feel disappointed in myself for misplacing it. Now though, I’m wise enough to know that nothing really belongs to me. If a book wanders off into some other hands, so be it. That’s the life those words want to live.
Messy girls know that making piles is an art form. Every time a pile is created there is a completely new common denominator. This is a pile of clothes I think I’ll give away but need to try on one more time just to make sure. Over here is a pile of miscellaneous papers and things I’ve picked up from the sidewalk that could be good for collaging. That right there is a pile of books I need to return to either the Tutt Library or the Pikes Peak Library. And those piles will sit on average for 2-3 months before the task at hand gets completed. Or more likely they get swept up into a new pile. A pile of piles, one might say.
Every messy girl needs their perfect messy roommate. Someone who won’t be surprised when your shower shoes somehow end up under their bed. Someone who also has to throw at least five things onto the floor from their bed before they go to sleep. Someone who knows that Sunday morning is the time to put on a record, clean up your whole room and pray that it will be at least Monday afternoon before it returns to looking like a tornado ran through your space. She will be someone who finds a perfectly good bouquet of flowers in a trash can and brings them home and will send you a photo of an uneaten but unwrapped sandwich sitting loose on the bench of a subway station, simply because she appreciates how out of place it is.
My parents gave up early on trying to make my sister and I keep our rooms clean. They asked only for us to make a clear path to our bed so that if they needed to get to us in the middle of the night they wouldn’t break their necks. To ask to keep our rooms tidy was futile, mostly because the rest of our house had succumbed to my dad’s clutter (which he argues could all be useful someday). Stacks and stacks of cookbooks he got from the yearly library sale, countless CDs of every different genre, and every kitchen gadget one could imagine. Now that I am older and wiser (and have fully inherited his genes), I am grateful he kept all of his cassettes from college so I can listen to the mixtapes he made his friends and think about the things I have now my kids will be happy I kept.
It always felt weird to me when I went over to a friend’s house and it was spotless. Where were the signs of a life lived? Where was the chaos? Where were the piles of newspapers and coupon clippings, the mangle of shoes near the front door, the loose dog toys that were always a tripping hazard, and the plates on the kitchen island left out from breakfast? I don’t think I’ll ever bother to tie my life up with a neat bow. It’s more like when you try to wrap an awkward-shaped gift and bits of it aren’t covered well by wrapping paper.
The person I have chosen as my roommate also adheres to this ethos; that a space should be lived in. Visitors should be greeted by remnants of our activities and possibly even track it out the door. In our cramped double in Montgomery, one almost always left with a piece of yarn stuck to their shoe and a baked good we had made earlier that day. This is the hospitality that our families taught us and that we bring into our shared spaces. We thrive on disorder, and we plan to keep it that way.