Prompt
With each passing year, you accumulate more stuff. Your new holiday gifts have been put out, but now is the perfect time to make some extra space and purge your old belongings. Donation centers are bustling but there’s never a bad time to give to the needy. Going through your belongings, you may find any number of things. Something you thought was lost? Or just a bad case of nostalgia? Now is a good time to reflect on what is important to you—and maybe actually find some things you can part with.
Joseph wasn't one of those people who had very big holidays. It was a natural consequence of taking off to go to school somewhere other than where his family had planned and having cut nearly all contact with said family in order to do it. He'd come to terms with this years ago, and was pretty content with his quiet holidays. Or... mostly quiet, anyway, given that for the last few years he'd somehow ended up dragged into the Wiley family's holiday shenanigans due to his girlfriend's pleading eyes. He didn't use the term 'shenanigans' lightly, either, given how big and full that house was, how many people there were and how ridiculous the family patriarchs were.
It was nothing at all like his own home had been: chaotic and loud where his had been orderly and followed a precise routine that he hated. And there was so much food. Joseph was entirely sure the Wileys could feed a small army with all of the food they made over the holidays, and this year had been no exception. He'd even been encouraged to take some of the leftovers home with him, since apparently his diet wasn't good enough to please Emil Wren's uncle at all.
That hadn't been the only kind of thing he'd ended up taking home with him, of course, and while by this year the Wileys knew what sort of gifts he'd actually use (as he knew theirs, and what did it say about him and Wren that he was so welcome at family holidays now anyway?) the first year or two had been an adventure in learning just what everyones' tastes were. He was pretty sure he still had the ridiculous-looking kettle Wren's dad had given him shoved in a closet somewhere, and it was this he was looking for now.
He didn't have a lot of things stored up, and he planned to keep it that way: letting junk build up in his home (even well-meant, gently gifted junk) was something he wasn't comfortable with, and there was no point in letting it sit around when it could go to someone who'd like it a lot more than he did. The kettle was on that list, along with a few sweaters he'd never worn and never would, and a few other odds and ends he'd accumulated. There was nothing really that stood out as he saw it, and the kettle was the last thing on his list. Shifting a cardboard box aside to get at the one resting under it - the one Joseph was pretty sure contained the kitschy teakettle - he noticed a folder half wedged underneath it and frowned. He didn't remember that...
Fetching the folder, he held it one hand as he dug out the kettle, right where he had thought it was,and carried both to the living room. Once there he placed the kettle in a box along with its donation-buddies, and flipped through the folder. There were some old photos tucked into it, ones from before he left home - his Dad with his hand on his shoulder, his sister holding onto his arm. He looked miserable it it, and Joseph knew why: it was taken just after his graduation. Tucked in with it was forms for West Point, along with a sealed letter from his father.
Now he remembered why he'd shoved that folder in the closet, and the redhead frowned, carrying the folder right back and dropping it where he'd shoved it before, leaving the letter unread. Sure, it had been a few years now, but he still wasn't ready to bother with the old man's condemnation and disappointment.
Maybe in a decade or two he'd be willing to look at it. But not this year.
Word Count: 634
