I looked about to see where my mess was, but I couldn’t find the mess. All the papers and books I had imagined cluttering everything up—there was nothing like that there. The hard brown carpet had recently been vacuumed, and there were two small hatboxes against the wall, one on top of the other. I went up to the boxes and knelt and opened them, and in them was my stuff. This was the mess I had left behind? This was what had been cluttering my mother’s mind for so long?
