The Dumping Grounds above Us—Things as they are 8

Every society/community has its own dumping grounds. These places contain things no one wanted, or things no one wanted but someone could want in the future. That place for us is the space between our lockers and the roof, and it is scary.

 
There’s a hollow space between the lockers and the roof as there’s this cement structure that encases the lockers. Everything that makes the room look untidy goes into that place: Sa’s socks, his beddings, the shirts he borrowed from so many people but stopped caring for, the football boots he borrowed and doesn’t care for anymore, and other things we don’t want anymore. At first, it only had the blankets we did not need for summer. Then we added some old books that we thought we might need as references.
 

Then came Sa’s belongings. One day, he was running out of clean shirts so he gave all the shirts to the laundry and borrowed one. Something similar happened a month later, and a few weeks after that. He soon realised that instead of making his shirts dirty and risking them to the absolutely incompetent laundry, he could simply borrow them from other people, and throw them when they got dirty. He discovered that people rarely remembered who they gave their shirts to. Then things stated getting out of hand, and he started borrowing things like ties, sweaters, and blazers.
 

Now, everybody knows The Borrower. Whenever someone’s misses a clothing item, the first thing he does is check the dumpster of our room to see if it is there. Quite a lot have found their stuffs up there actually, so it has been helpful. For us, it’s a nuisance: we have to explain to them that we do not have their clothes ‘by mistake’ and that not all the lost clothing items are ‘borrowed’ by Sa. Lately, people have stopped coming to the room for clothes, probably because Sa discovered that his clothes were they most comfortable and stopped borrowing, so we still have a big pile of old unclaimed clothes up there. These things collect even though we give them to the laundry every two weeks so that they go to their owners after being cleaned.
 

The books in the dumping grounds are still kind of irritating, though. It’s hard for us to let go of the books which might prove to be very useful, yet they sit there, doing nothing, making our room look like a used bookstore, and inviting Bookworms and mice. We will probably let them go only after we leave the room.