I Love Like a Hoarder

Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it- DFW

There’s a box in my apartment I can’t open without bracing myself. It’s just a box—cardboard, duct-taped at the corners, tucked away on the top shelf of my closet—but it’s heavy with feeling. A ticket to a concert where someone kissed my palm in the dark. A letter I never sent. A pair of earrings from someone who told me I was hard to love but still bought me jewelry shaped like tiny gold stars. A smooth rock from a beach in Maine. A burnt birthday candle from the night I baked a near stranger cupcakes, certain—before I even knew his middle name—that I would love him.

I think most people would call it clutter, but to me it’s a living archive. I’ve never loved lightly, so I’ve never been able to forget lightly either. I’ve kept it all: not just the keepsakes, but the digital shadows, the screenshots, the voicemails that I never listen to but can’t delete. I love like a hoarder—messy, sentimental, unwilling to let go, stacking memory on top of memory like a tower I’m convinced won’t fall if I balance it just right.

Sometimes I envy people who can end things cleanly. The ones who can block and unfollow and erase, who purge their pasts like expired medicine. I imagine they sleep better. Their minds must be like white walls, quiet and pristine. But mine is crowded. The lights are always on. There are boxes stacked against the windows and names scribbled in the margins of every story I try to write.

There’s a quote by David Foster Wallace that lives rent-free in my head: “Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it.” I think about it every time someone says just move on. As if grief is a light switch. As if longing isn’t a feral thing. I’ve never known how to let go without fighting for it first. Even when I know it’s over. Even when I’m the one who ended it. I’ll still find myself circling the ache like a bruise I can’t help pressing.

I know it’s not romantic, this kind of attachment. It’s not some charming trait that makes me lovable. It’s compulsive. Exhausting. Sometimes even a little grotesque. The emotional version of keeping your childhood stuffed animals on your adult bed. But I’ve always experienced love as something immersive, total. Not a chapter but a whole damn novel, dog-eared and reread and underlined in red pen. You don’t just shelve that. Not if it was real.

A friend once told me I live in the afterglow too long. That I stretch the ending of things like taffy, trying to find some sweetness in the unraveling. Maybe they’re right. But I think it’s because I don’t trust that anything else will make me feel quite the same way again. And maybe, if I hold onto it long enough, it’ll come back. Like it was just misplaced.

When I’m in love, I’m obsessive in a quiet way. I memorize hands. The curve of a laugh. The way their name looks in my phone. I become an archivist of ordinary moments. How they stir their coffee.The way they sigh when the words catch in their throat, when what they want sits just out of reach. I write it all down, even if only in my head. I catalog it like proof: See? It happened. It was beautiful. It mattered.

And when it ends, I can’t just walk away. I trail behind for months, years sometimes, sweeping up emotional confetti. A smell on someone else’s shirt. A song in a grocery store. I gather and I gather and I tell myself I’ll let it go eventually. But I don’t. Not really.

The thing about loving like this is that it’s not always about the other person. Sometimes it is. But sometimes it’s also about the version of myself I got to be in their orbit. The softness I accessed. The curiosity. The clarity. Letting go means saying goodbye to that girl too—the one who lit up at the sound of a message, who rearranged her whole afternoon just to see them for twenty minutes, who believed that this might be it.

And I don’t want to lose her.

So I keep the box. And the shirt. And the playlist he made me that still feels like a small spell cast in my direction. I keep the poems I wrote that I’ll never send. I keep the old text threads even though they’re mostly just "on my way" and "did you eat?" and "I miss you." I keep it all, like a woman afraid of amnesia. Because I am.

Because forgetting would be worse than hurting.

I wish I could be the kind of person who says, we had our time, and that was enough. But I am never finished. Not when it comes to people. Not when it comes to love. I want more time. More explanation. One more conversation where they say the thing they never said. One more night where everything makes sense.

But life doesn’t give you the ending you deserve. People don’t come back just because you were ready, present, and willing to stay. Sometimes, closure is just learning to live with the echo of someone who walked away.

So yes, I love like a hoarder. Like someone stacking sentiment on sentiment, tripping over the past just trying to get through the day. It’s not elegant. It’s not tidy. But it’s honest. And it’s full. And sometimes, when I open the box and hold one of those little relics in my hand, I remember not just what it felt like to be loved—but what it felt like to be loving.

And that is something I will never, ever throw away.

x,

Stephanie

If my writing made you nod along, feel a little less alone, or just gave you something to overthink later, consider buying me a coffee. It’s a small way to say, “Hey, keep doing the thing,” and I’d really appreciate it.