Childhood to Trash in No Time Flat

It's weird cleaning out your childhood room. It's weirder still
cleaning it out with your parents watching, and a plane to catch severely limiting your time. Fair chunks of my past went into the trash because I knew they were embarrassing (read, did not want to leave for my parents to look through later), but the time crunch + audience didn't leave me enough room to really find out just how embarrassing vs. their value for keeping. Gone are my tragic short stories, penned as a high school freshman. Gone is the bad pastel art of sunsets seen from the porch. Gone are the porcelain unicorns, plush unicorns, and their entire ilk (good lord, could no one save the unicorns?). Gone, gone, gone. Probably for the better. I did manage to scoop up the old diaries to look at later, after securing the hidden key (still wedged in the shoe of a creepy southern-belle doll). Still, I'm kind of embarrassed to look at those, even alone and in the privacy of my own home. Maybe I'll hold onto them for some future archaeology of my own childhood mind, and see what kind of information distance and perspective gain me. Or (and more likely) maybe I'll tuck them away to cringe over later.