Self Portrait as Wall Collage

A list of things I kept and mounted in my childhood bedroom between 2009 and 2017

It started in 2009: the first piece of paper I scotch-taped to the wall of my childhood bedroom. In the bottom right corner behind my bedside table, I stuck up a handful of photographs: me at the ballet before my memories were forming, my friends at a Bat Mitzvah, the photo that was taken of me at pre-school picture day to be sent home in the mail, my blonde hair flipped out at the ends.

What was it that made me want to hang these, so strangely and haphazardly, on the wall? I must have been inspired by the way I’d see Annie pin movie stubs to her cork board — how everything had the possibility to be a sentimental keepsake if only handled in the right way. We were 11 the first time I saw her bedroom, attached to that Jack and Jill bathroom, the mirror with so many quotes written across it. Life is not a dress rehearsal. She always knew how to do all the coolest things first.

I must have known, when I put up those first photos, that the project would quickly expand to train tickets, CDs, the first note my first love ever wrote to me, all my playbills. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have started in the corner. I can only imagine that I must have known.

It only took a few years before three walls of the room were completely covered in postcards, handwritten poems, photo strips from various malls, bowling alleys, Forever 21s. One wall I saved for later: for everything I collected when I lived in France, including the Sharpied piece of paper with my host family’s internet password (AA242424). I can explain almost every scrap on every wall: many of them have a story or a memory attached, maybe because I am good at remembering insignificant details — the whole world, after all, is a poem that cannot be constructed without them — or maybe because I hung up the pieces of paper in the first place, signifying to my brain some kind of importance.

I’ve been thinking so much about the material world: the tactile, the physical, the things we can hold in our hands. I imagine a version of this scrapbooked wall in a file folder on my laptop — or worse, in the cloud. It almost immediately loses most of its meaning. When would I look through it and read the note Annie wrote me for my seventeenth birthday? When would I ever see the spring reading list from some long-over English class, parsing out day by day which chapters we needed to have read between April 25 and May 7? And what about the invitation to the wedding of my first voice teacher, the one I called Mom, the one I was so heartbroken to see leave Colorado with her new husband?

It’s been six years since I was in my childhood bedroom at the end of the year, waking up on Christmas morning surrounded by receipts from purchases I made in 2013. It’s been a long time since I’ve really looked at the wall and remembered all the different versions of myself that are preserved there, though not forever, because my parents are talking about moving, and everything is temporary: especially paper, especially the material world, which is part of what makes it so wonderful.

So, in honor of being here now — closing out this year, surrounded by walls turned toward scrapbooks, by all these movie stubs that otherwise might be long ago in a landfill — here is a list of 25 things I stuck onto my walls between the years of 2009 and 2017: an ode, of sorts, to materiality, and to the art of trying to keep.

1. The pink Hot Wheels car that my parents gave me for my 16^th birthday (not drivable but a good joke; still in the box)

2. My first theater teacher’s full name and home phone number

3. A tag from a pair of leg warmers, which I wore obsessively for a few years, self-conscious about the shape of my legs

4. A long chain of folded, interlocking gum wrappers in the style that my dad taught me when I was six years old on an hours-long train ride

5. A sticky note featuring “school rules” in what I’m deducing is probably my handwriting at 5 years old

6. A review form from a practice audition at Disneyland when I was 18, that reads “Hire, Cinderella”

7. A signed admittance ticket to the Senate Gallery for the One Hundred Thirtieth Congress

8. A ticket to an underground club in Barcelona, paid for by a member of a French bachelor party that was staying in the same hostel room as I was

9. A pencil drawing of the New York City skyline, done by my high school sweetheart Pat

10. A photo strip of Pat and I being goofy, then kissing, at the prom

11. A choral CD with different track recordings of five harmonic vocal parts for a song called “Justorum Animae”

12. The phone case of my first iPhone, the plastic blistered and warped from the time I set my phone down on a stove burner

13. My first MetroCard, purchased 2011

14. Wallet-sized professional photo prints of my first non-girlfriend’s first definite-girlfriend

15. A gift card for frozen yogurt

16. The key to a storage locker that was once full of hoop-skirted princess costumes, many of which I wore to children’s birthday parties to sing for them

17. A ticket to see the 4 p.m. “Black Holes” feature at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science’s planetarium

18. The Safeway Club card I was given as a “perk” when I worked at Safeway (these are free and available to the public)

19. A dried and faded olive branch that I found on the floor of a cathedral in Normandy

20. An unused sachet of tea

21. A seashell

22. My first published poem

23. The pink hat I wore when playing Kathy in my high school’s production of Singin’ in the Rain, still with a bobby pin dangling from its side

24. A peacock feather, which was once a pair, worn as earrings and now separated

25. A note written from a stranger, named after my hometown, days before I moved away from it eleven years ago

It’s been a long time since I put anything new on the wall, but later today, I’m meeting Annie at the bowling alley between our childhood homes, where we used to go at 12 or 13 to mostly not bowl. There was a photo booth tucked into one corner that was our biggest interest: with the curtain pulled shut, we fed our crumpled dollar bills into its slot, straightening them carefully against the machine’s edge. These are among the first things I hung on the wall: cut into individual frames, across so many years, we are sticking our tongues out, showing our teeth off at various stages. Most of the photos feature just the two of us, though sometimes, there is a third friend, laughing, caught in sepia, dead now since 2019.

Maybe there will still be that photo booth, probably seven dollars now, payable by phone tap; maybe we’ll pack into it as we once did, bigger now, more squished, still friends, still giggling. Everything changes and everything doesn’t. There is Scotch tape in the drawer downstairs, where my mother has always kept it. A collage can always be added to, like a person. Layers accumulating, one after another, collecting sun and dust and pulling against the paint, until something like sense is made.