MY CLOSET is full of clothes and shoes — that’s a given. But digging through it can be like walking through memory lane. There are papers, books, and lots of other things that I’ve kept throughout my school years, from kindergarten to senior year.

Throughout my elementary years, I kept every paper and notebook. Nothing before my 5th grade was exciting, just some scratchy handwriting, alphabet, and other random things my mom decided to keep.

Somewhere in there, there’s a really crappy story I wrote about a girl with powers in 5th grade.

I was in 6th grade when we had to switch to online school because of COVID, but it was definitely my favorite year. My teacher had a point system to ‘buy’ homes, pets, vehicles, and so on (all fake, of course), and it was a lot of fun! One day, our teacher had us make data sheets with the class, and my group chose music genres and zodiac signs. I recorded all this in a notebook, then moved to Google Sheets. My friend and I even got to make Google Slides for our friend’s zodiacs, just for the fun of it! When COVID first started, our teacher had us take notes on events around the world. It’s cool to look back at the first page, written around the first week of January 2020.

I don’t have much memorabilia from 7th grade. I took notes on illnesses for health class and on what we were learning in math that year. I also still have a few pages on FFI (fatal familial insomnia), a really rare neurodegenerative disease.

I kept the most random stuff from 8th grade. I don’t condone stealing, of course, but there was this history teacher whom I absolutely hated, and our school had these reflection papers, and I stole some from the teacher.

Of course, it wasn’t just silly forms that I kept. I also kept recipes from my cooking class, atom models from science, Spanish tests and vocab, and ALL my math notes. I can’t remember exactly what class I had my friend in, but they explained the 4th dimension on a sticky note. We used 9 sticky notes that day, and I  kept them all. I also kept a random piece of paper a friend from Spanish class threw at me, a lip-bite drawing from another friend in cooking class, a heart made of plastic by a mutual friend, and so on. It’s all in a small metal box!

Now at Granger High School, almost everything is online instead of on paper. I have a notebook for each year filled with ideas, homework, or just about my day. It’s not much anymore, but I still cherish it all.