reverie and residue.

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i was feeling all GUNG-HO industrious and shit, pulled out the boxes from the back of the closet, fully intending to throw away whatever was inside in order to make way for a new life, in order to lighten my load and get myself in a new york state of mind.  i pulled back the cardboard covers and found a huge artwork i'd made for my mother-  a deadbed/rosebed i made in the weeks after her death; a huge collection of crocheted roses in varying sizes and shades of red, displayed on a piece of dark red felt on the floor which was cut to the exact dimensions of the bed she died in, a bed which i layed down next to her in and crocheted red roses and lay them on her thin chest the last day she was alive.

there's no fucking way i can get rid of something like that!  there's just no way!  it's impossible!  i texted my sister in a panic because there's also really no way to bring my entire art collection to the east coast (at least not initially) and asked her if she had any space at all in the back of a closet in her house where i could store some art for a time.  sweetheart that she is, she said yes immediately and told me not to get stressed out about this stuff; "i'll make room for whatever you want to keep, sweet sister" she wrote.  i breathed a deep sigh of relief but still this strange anxiety.  it takes a lot out of me to go through these boxes, these memories, these secrets, the evidence of a life...  of lives.

i went through the red suitcase that houses tons of saved photographs and postcards.  there were some old scraps of paper with messy notes to self scrawled across them that i easily tossed in to the recycle bin, and a few books given to me by a long-forgotten acquaintance that i never got around to reading due to sheer lack of interest which are now sitting on the sidewalk in front of my house. then, i came across my 23 page poem-thing/manuscript that i haven't worked on since i left my last relationship.  i shoved it into this suitcase and then the suitcase was shoved into a tiny storage unit where it sat silently for close to a year.  i couldn't bare to read it once i brought it home.  i sifted through the pages tonight, skipping the intensely sad parts, but thinking that i really should go back to it, dive in, see if i can finish the thing...

going through all this...  it's an entire life!  it's who i've been and where i've come from.  it's the residue and evidence of my growth, of my Becoming.  it's the maps i've used.  it's the maps i made for myself with words and images and the sweet postcards that came to me from friends. how do i get rid of these things?  and should i even be trying to do such a thing???  they are not trinkets and baubles, they are meaningful objects.  objects which contain the spirit of a Past, a Family, a Mother, a Daughter, and the puzzle of love and loss. it's a diary.

and then there's THAT.  my diary!  it's humongous!  i've been keeping a daily diary for more than 6 years. i don't even dream of parting with these volumes of scribbles and rants.  not for a second.  but they definitely pose a bit of a predicament for someone who was hoping to move by airplane with two bags of luggage.  hahaha!  that's certainly beginning to seem a bit unrealistic. i'm feeling a bit like Anais Nin right now wondering what the fuck to do with a diary that needs a suitcase all to itself.  :)  i'm glad i still have almost 6 weeks to figure it out but that's not really much time at all.  6 weeks is nothing.

sigh...

and i'm not even complaining.  not at all.  i'm looking forward to this change so much!   i am exhilarated!  i'm ecstatic!  i've been wanting to do this for so long and i am overjoyed that the day when i can hop on a plane with a one-way ticket to new york in my hand is almost here.  and the fact that brian and i are doing this together makes it even better.  i'm so glad that i'm doing this with my best-friend.  now, if i could only find a way to shrink all these things down and make them miniature-sized!   i truly do want to make room for a new life, a new world.

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brooding

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honest to god, i look at my old art and i don't even know who created it.

i look at the work and i remember so clearly each stroke of the brush, the temper of the day, the way the light fell across the oil and lit up the green pollen that fell from the Evergreens above and endeared itself to the liquin on my canvas...  i remember how annoying it was.  J coming home from work covered in grease and kissing me on the forehead, looking approvingly at the progress i'd made since he'd last seen the canvas while our dog cowered with excitement at his feet, waiting to be scratched on the head and told "good girl!'.   i was waiting for the same phrase...

because it was me who spread that black across sheets of white.  it was me who went running down highway 128 each morning with a rotweiller at my side, cigarette in hand and a cup of coffee waiting at the finish line each morning.  it was me who blogged every day and slid my paint around and tried to read philosophy but got too caught up in dreaming about far away places instead.  i did those things.  i have the memories; no matter how hard i try to block them out.

it's been so easy to look away.

i don't want to remember the Past.  i like to think of it in huge swatches of time.  eras, rather than specifics.  i don't let myself think about how broken my heart actually is...  how sensitive i am...  how easily hurt, how easily turned off...  how easy it is for me to give up.

all it takes is one harsh word.

maybe that's unfair but that's the way it is.  i just can't stomach it anymore.  i've had too much of the yelling and the fighting and the name calling.  i just can't do it anymore.  and i'm okay if that makes me a freak.  i walk along listening to pop music with tears in my eyes and thinking of my mother's hand on my cheek.  i walk along thinking of a child i'll never bare running up and grabbing my pinky and saying "mama!"  i walk along and thing of the close family warmth that other people know and trust.  and i am separate.  i am individual.  and that's okay.

maybe after all that's happened i'm incapable of actually having the type of life other people seem to hold so dear?  i think of my dead mother and i can hear her screaming at me, "just be yourself!  do whatever makes you happy, little girl!"

and i do.  i try to.  i'm happiest when i can wrangle a plane ticket and some time off, alone with my diary, ink flowing and no clock to punch.  it's just that the lines get crossed so easily when it comes to other people.  my heart is so full of hope that it pains me to endure anything less that what we are capable of.  perhaps i am a perfectionist after all.  and, let me tell you,



it is hell.

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