Paying for the past

We stood there cleaning up the apartment we'd rented nearly thirty years before. New words could be coined to mean "filthy" just by describing some of what we've seen. There were locusts that were not afraid of us at all. 

For hours I cleaned and threw things away, just going through it all and wondering where it had all gone and how impossible the task seemed to be. I began to fall into despair not knowing how I was going to pay for all of the clean-up and repair that needed to be made.

Then I found the box of checkbooks and the receipts and discovered I'd already done this action in the past, and there's no longer anything to do to clean up that mess. I could move on. 

But where would I go?