Unpacking the
boxes and boxes of papers and books I have been lugging from
apartment to apartment over the past few years, it occurs to me to actually see what it is I am
schlepping around, and whether the memories are worth their
weight.
Here is a sheaf of papers, three inches thick, three, I don’t even remember this part of when I met a man twice my age. I don’t recall, not at all printing out all our correspondence. The back and forth, give and take, the flirting and bantering, shameful, and all here on paper. Chucked.
Here is a folder, Garfield tm in a blue funk. High school, if memory serves me correctly. Yes, here are all my creative writing essays, A’s and B’s and the two C’s I laughed at. And some sorry-assed rhyming poem wannabe’s from 8th grade. Ha! Kept.
And here, from when I thought I could draw…that stupid cartoonish dog, laughing, drooling, moping, loping. And those damned rocks at the top of the driveway – pages upon pages, (attempt after attempt) of poorly shaded, barely recognizable inanimate objects. Chucked.
And my programming notes, scribbles really, referencing beginner books I’ve long lost, and homemade Boggle boards. Lab assignments, graded, torn, stained. Lab assigments unfinished with jottings of thought along the edges, zany arrows and flowcharts I can no longer decode. Chucked.
Here, this makes me laugh until there are tears to my eyes, my fascinatingly detailed teen angst log. God, I was a sad, sad child. And yet, still, there is some sort of lyricism I detect in middle of all the poor me and Fuck them and blahblahblahblah. Kept.
It's been time for a while, time to prune down my life and the detritus I carry around, time to weed out the things that are no longer relevant, time to toss the things that are merely shreds of the past that I cling to for no other reason but they are the only tangible reminder I have. Some of these things had to go. Some, I fear, I will dig out of the trash later on. So it goes...if I can't toss it easily without regret, I'll just drag it around for another year until I can.