Giddings [✓]

Chapter 2 · Sorting

The morning sunshine filtered through the window blinds, casting horizontal strips of light across the various boxes laying around Dan’s room. He was packing up his belongings and leaving his apartment in Austin to move closer to the University of Houston, where he was starting his master’s program in physical therapy in the fall. 

Dan sat on the edge of his unmade bed, a drawer that he pulled out of his desk laying next to him. He had two piles of items accumulating on the floor in front of him, one with stuff he wanted to keep, and the other with things he planned on giving away. 

He sifted through the random stationary in the drawer and pulled out a stack of various business cards secured together with an ancient rubber band that looked ready to snap at any second. Dan figured he didn’t need the business cards anymore, given how long it had been since he’d even contemplated their existence. He tossed them to the side of the give away pile dedicated to trash and recycling, then returned to the drawer.

Amongst an assortment of ballpoint pens and highlighters were the two wooden game tiles he’d found in his mom’s backyard a couple of years ago. After he’d come back home, Dan had looked up what game they were from, discovering they were from the word game called Scrabble. He was a little puzzled upon discovering that because he was fairly certain his mom didn’t have any board games besides a few jigsaw puzzles. In any case, he’d ended up keeping the letters and not telling his mom about them. He figured they must have just blown into her yard by accident.

Dan ran his thumb across the engraved Z, then the I, trying to decide if he should keep them or not. Even though it was cool that he’d found them, he ultimately decided he wouldn’t need them since he never played the game anyway. He threw them into the give away pile, thinking that maybe someone else could make use of them one day.