Being in my parents’ house, the home in which I grew up, makes me realize that having a small Manhattan apartment really isn’t such a bad thing after all. When you have a smaller space, you tend to have a lesser desire to buy more stuff, which means less chance for clutter. Less space also tends to mean less to clean, which is always a positive in my book considering how anal I am about cleanliness. But to be honest, being in this house for too long ends up getting me angry for some reasons that have little to do with Ed. It has to do with how inefficiently this space is used and how worse it seems to get every single time I come back.

This second floor flat is technically three bedrooms and one bath. Only two people, my parents, live here. Yet there is stuff everywhere — all over the floors of the bedrooms, on the breakfast room booth seats, and even sitting on multiple chairs throughout the house. The sunroom (the third bedroom) floor has model trains, busted computers and hard drives, nails, and screwdrivers everywhere. There are papers scattered around the perimeter of the room. And then right in the center of the room are two vacuum cleaners; one is busted open while the other one has a cord that is undone. In my bedroom, there are two beds. My bed is usually covered with papers piled high everywhere when I am not home. I know this because my mom told me. Maybe, just maybe if my dad cleared all the clutter on the desk in the room, he could actually have space for all those piles of paper.

The sunroom makes me pretty mad because it used to be the play room in the house, the house where we had plants, an extra bed, and fun things. Now, it’s a room that is completely wasted and serves zero purpose other than to dry clothes. A desk sits in there with two chairs (one of which is obviously extraneous) piled with junk on them. The desk is covered in about 10 different open hard drives. As someone who’s lived in Manhattan for four years now, I get mad when I see space that is wasted. You have all this great space, but you’re not even going to use it the best way?!

And then I thought, one day, I’m going to clear out this house, and I’m literally going to take everything and dump it into a massive garbage bin. I can feel my blood pressure going up when I see all the clutter that has zero meaning. This house is Marie Kondo’s worst nightmare. She’d get heart palpitations walking through this place.