Recently, my wife and I realized a lifelong dream of ours: we cleaned out our two-basements-made-one. Both of us had long been planning to go through the decades of boxes accumulating downstairs when we had a free moment, in much the same way that we have been planning to go get cheap Microsoft stock when one of us invents time travel. Unfortunately, that free moment never seemed to come; I for one decided to clean out my storage space three storage spaces ago and have just been adding one or two never-opened boxes with each move, considering them pre-packed for next time.

One day, however, the scales were tipped when my wife’s parents, delighted by the purchase of our new home, celebrated by bringing us hundreds more boxes. Their stated goal was to empty their own basement of my wife’s things, but we realized the joke was on us right about the time we emptied my sister-in-law’s third box of stuffed animals. They had used us to clean out their own space so thoroughly that we were surprised to find them still living in their house after we were done.

This sudden, all-encompassing packing thoroughness seems to have been a theme in my wife’s life. While we were going through her boxes, at one point we uncovered her college bookbag. It still had all of her books and notebooks, her gum and aspirin and tissues, as if she was late for chemistry even now. Forensically, it looked for all the world like she had come home from school one day to find her dad frantically tossing their clothes in the trunk and shouting, “The feds! They found us! Just take what you can carry and we’ll send for the rest!”

I mocked her for the bookbag for half an hour, until we opened one of my boxes and I found this:

For the uninitiated, this is a 10-year-old, perfectly preserved bottle of Orbitz which, before it was a gum or a travel company, was an unpopular mucus-based beverage. (Those little balls of goo are supposed to be there. We paid for it that way.) I kept this bottle on my desk junior year, where it functioned as a lava lamp; to this day I don’t know what it tastes like, other than “probably worse now.” Another thing I don’t know: why, at the end of that year, I put it in a box for a decade, only to find it four moves later.