Keep the car in drive.

The other day I decided that it was finally time to get rid of my toys. It was something that I had been thinking about for a long time, but never acted on for multiple reasons. Chief among them, the fact that I still played with them from time to time. I'm just a boy. I can't resist opening my Lego box or busting out my action figures every once in a while. You just get that urge to sit down and let go of all of the nonsense you're forced to deal with every day. Plus, I mean, some of these toys are pretty badass. I'd sit down and play with them until the sun came up, unfolding a plastic drama on my carpet and realizing I'd never be able to part with any of it. The sentimentality and the creativity they fueled.

But, after months and years of telling myself I would and after months and years of being told I should, I did.

And it was so easy at first. I mean, when was the last time I played with G.I. Joe? Or those generic soldier action figures? Just as soon as I'd spotted them, they were packed up in bags and boxes, ready to disappear. And then, the old books I never read. And I cleared the clutter off my bookshelves and consolidated everything to maximize space.

Then, I sorted through the Star Wars action figures. It was almost a mindless operation. I'd grab a handful of them or one of the vehicles and drop it into the cardboard box. I didn't want the Tatooine Landspeeder with the faulty windshield anymore. I didn't want the Naboo Speeder they'd bought for me to play with at the wedding in California anymore. I didn't want Prince Xizor or Grand Moff Tarkin. Or the rest of the characters I never really liked. I did want, however, Luke Skywalker. The figure I'd gotten for Christmas and held onto so tightly while watching Return of the Jedi again, lightsaber in his gloved hand. I did want Han Solo, frozen in carbonite. The figure I convinced my mom I needed to have in order to finish my collection of protagonists from Return of the Jedi. I pulled aside just a couple of memories for myself, and put the rest away. It was easy enough. Just cleaning.

Finally I got to the Lego box.

The bad Lego sets left immediately. The knock offs, the sets I never liked, the little $2 ones, the old kits I never played with in the first place. But, as the remaining bricks dwindled, I came to the real reason I still had a Lego box in my room. Among the handful of vehicles that remained, a collection of unattractively constructed ships and cars that had cannibalized greater builds, sat my prized fleet. Three jets I'd built years and years before. They were, in many ways, perfect. The look, the design, the capacity, the function. Even seven or eight years later I was still proud of them. And among those jets, the first one I'd built. It even had "wing lights" to differentiate port from starboard. And a space for the engine. And turbines. I played with that ship for years. I did research into jets and jet design and engineering before I finished building it. I read books, searched the internet, and studied pictures. In the end, I built a Lego jet that I was more proud of than many other things I'd done in my life. In the end, it was a bunch of random bricks that a boy squeezed together. In the end, it wouldn't fit in the bag whole.

And in the end, I broke it apart.

It was a horrible, gut-twisting feeling. As I peeled away the layers of Lego bricks, I could see where the dust had settled and outlined where they had once sat. It wasn't just a Lego jet I was dismantling and dropping in a box to give to some unappreciative child. It was my childhood--an integral part of it, at least. With effort, I dropped all the pieces into the bag and put it with the others. I saved my little Lego pilot, though. My Lego avatar who flew that jet to Hell and back a hundred times over. Who climbed mountains and explored the ocean and colonized space and defended foreign civilizations. Through whom I lived vicariously.

I hate growing up.