I’m throwing away my life.
Quite literally, I am throwing decades of keepsakes and memorabilia into the trashcan. Keychains from my summer in mexico over 15 years ago. Fliers from raves I attended.
A blue plastic raft built for Ninja Turtles. The only toy a 12 year old boy could afford in the year after his parent’s divorced, purchased with money garnered from a month of scrupulous baseball card management. That spring, when the record snow fall melted and fled the mountains to be married to the April showers, the dry canal bed in front of the house sprang to life. The rivulets through the yard with their mini foot bridges were filled to overflowing and the impromptu water park provided ample hours of entertainment for a prepubescent ex-patriot.
Notes and cards from childhood sweethearts; some worth keeping for the smile they produce, others not. Grade school valentines, bits of paper with names lacking faces; all get trashed. Pictures by the handful; heartwrenching, silly, beautiful. Some of them damaged, most of them more fresh in my mind than they are on the photo paper.
The cards from Jenniferocious somehow outnumber anyone else. Feeling lonely, I call her to see if she will answer.
“Hello?”
“HEY! Wanna come over and play?”
“Ummm, it’s sunday. I’m relaxing and watching TV. Probably not.”
“oh. well, that’s cool. Ummm, I gotta go, then.”
“Are you ok?”
“Totally. I’ll call you later.”
Mentally, I scan the derelict halls of my brain for anyone else, anyone who can laugh over these empty recollections… And there is no one. No one around to share the abandonment of my memories.
A clacking wooden puzzle. An overlarge key from Alcatraz. Empty postcards.
A slowly deteriorating 3 ring binder of bad poetry and letters I never had the balls to send. It’s covered with black and white prints of Drew Barrymore around a Rolling stones sticker I bought one fall in Cincinatti. I bought if for the big breasted blonde with the high pitched voice. We worked together, long hours for little pay and less recognition. She left it in a hotel room; reeking of the forest fire smell of burning marijuana and Newports. I never saw her again after she left chicago that winter with a lipstick lesbian named Cheyenne from Orange County. Strange that I remember so much about her, and not her name.
The pages are littered with my obsessions. Scattered around this paper with abandon like cigarette butts put out in a half eaten Entemann’s; there are a few good spots, but it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. On this page I want solitude, over there I need a father. I’ve found a lover here, but know she’ll be gone by the end of the next page. Pet names and suicide threats, happy tears and my angry, angry smiles; it would be hard to pick them apart if I hadn’t been there for all of them. I don’t need them anymore.
With the mindless one foot in front of the other determination of a lost soldier, I just keep shucking these old injuries into the trash. One… after another… after another… after another.
A vial of sand from the beach in San Diego; the last time I ever saw my childhood friend Jana. I’m staring at the brittle plastic and it’s cherry tomato red lid in quiet observance of memories I don’t need anymore when suddenly the canister leaves my hand before I can even register that I’ve thrown it. It floats in a lofting arc, jumper-at-the-buzzer, into the trash can landing sharply on the corner of a discarded tin; bursting and bleeding it’s contents through the discarded menagerie.
Watching the sands run, I’m reminded of an hourglass, it’s pregnant timely body smashed and wasted. All that time… wasted. As the sands run out, pieces of history falling all around the castoff treasures like a waterfall washing away the past, I imagine I can feel them all getting more faint with the passing grains, like shadows at twilight, melting into the world around them.
And abruptly, the trash cans are full.
I’ve been adrift on this sea of loneliness all day, bailing out the memoria leaking into my life raft as fast as possible with just my hands. But what do you do when there is nowhere left to bail to?
I don’t know. So I sit down amidst the empty boxes and full trash bags. And as this old world falls away, I pick up a pen…
“She left it behind in a hotel room reeking of the forest fire smell of burning marijuana and Newports” that sentence doesn’t make sense to me.
Love the hour glass metphor, though, it fits amazingly well.
Odd, I don’t remember ever going through my own memories like that. Not even when we moved. Either I didn’t have that many, or I just didn’t care for reliving them the way you seem to do.
This reads like a short story, or a prologue to a long one. It makes me want to read more. And I absolutely LOVE the ending. =)
I hadn’t read this comment previously. Thanks for all the feedback! i realize i left some punctuation out of that sentence. I’ll go fix it.
I’m glad someone else likes the way i put this down. It was a hell of a day.