In process of writing down all these memories for the scrapbox project, I'm discovering that an enormous number of them are sad.
"In ninth grade," I'll say, "I loved her desperately. She had soft red hair, a womanly figure, and a defined southwest Virgina accent. We spent days being absurd, she fuelled by drugs (though I didn't know/didn't admit to knowing it at the time), me by natural insanity. There were a thousand absurd running jokes, like one where we would just shout 'Yellow Dog!' in the middle of everything. She would take me by the arm and pull me with her, and we would talk about nothing in the dark corner by the stairs, she leaning on me or sprawling out across the floor.
"In eleventh grade she became pregnant and had an abortion. The day she found out about the pregnancy I found her crying outside the theater building.
"'What's wrong?' I asked, putting my arm around her shoulders. 'Something bad,' she answered. 'Can I help? Do you want to tell me?'
"'No,' she said. 'It's too bad. It's really really bad. Someone like you couldn't understand.' Then she took off the pretty sunflower hair-clip she was wearing and put it in my hair. 'Here,' she said. 'You keep it. It looks better on you anyway.'
"She walked away and turned the corner around the side of the building. I never saw her after that. Years later, I wonder if she gave me that clip because she saw in me the child she would never be again."
It's a sad story. It's a really sad story, and I'd never even realized how sad it was until I wrote it down. And there are a bunch of them like that. So many of the things I need to write down seem to end "I never saw her after that."
"We never really talked after that year."
"I lost track of him. Years later I saw him in the grocery store, skeletally thin. I wondered if he were sick, but didn’t know how to ask, or how to tell him that I’d missed him all these years."
"That was the year we grew apart, me jealous of her affection for others, she afraid to give up any of the ground she was gaining."
Even when I'm writing about something more discrete -- a Weekly World News from the summer we lived in the Charlottesville apartment, for instance -- I seem to manage to make it part of a larger sad story. Not just "Jessica used to bring home the Weekly World News, which we pored over in delight," but "it was one of the few things that distracted us from the general misery and loneliness that summer. It seems to me to alternate between moments of hilarity gathered on the living room floor around the television or some ridiculous object, a muted feeling of emptiness and the impossibility of connection, and a desperate love for Nick."
This is not a happy way to tell that story. I could say something more positive -- something like "we all struggled, I think, with feeling out of place that summer, but nontheless managed to come together over television, TetrisAttack, Trivial Pursuit, the Weekly World News. We were a community, even in an environment that felt alien even while we inhabited it." That's (at least slightly) more happy. It focuses on the positive more.
But I don't seem to want to tell that story. And I'm wondering why. I don't think, generally, I've had a sadder life than most people. In fact, I think I've been enormously lucky to have a happier life than many people so far.
So why am I telling these sad stories, and why am I telling them this way? It might have something to do with who I am right now, for one thing. I am struggling now with a loss of connection and a difficulty in feeling meaningful, just as I was the apartment summer, just as I was in ninth grade. That may have an effect on how I view even the happy times I'm documenting.
But more than that, I'm afraid, I'm finding out that this is not just a scrapbook project for me. I think perhaps it's a journal of loss. Not necessarily always the loss of people (I have, thanks be to God or to luck or to those I love, lost relatively few people in my life), but the loss of time. And the loss of myself.
I have always, as far back as I can remember, been obsessed with loss and with losing. I have an over-developed fear of losing objects, even objects that are not precious to me. It’s the idea of losing itself that obsesses me. I have a very early memory, for instance, of watching “Snow White” for the first time. I can’t have been more than five at the time. The witch was moderately scary, and the fake-death of Snow White a little so as well, but what completely preoccupied me throughout the movie, and what I can still remember with the deep feeling of anxiety I had about it then, is that when Snow White is fleeing through the woods, she has a red bundle with her, presumably the most important things she took from the castle. But when she reaches the dwarves’ house she doesn’t have it anymore.
Somehow, along the way, she has lost her bundle. This to me, at the age of five, was even more terrible than any of the other events, because it indicated that Snow White had lost everything dear to her. How could a house full of dwarves or a mysterious handsome prince make up for that? Her home, her childhood, her sense of security, even her parents were gone. She had lost her bundle, lost the things and memories that made her who she was – a princess, a daughter, a child. I felt awful for her.
I can list you, even today, virtually every thing I have lost, because I hate losing so much. A ring lost at a party for our foreign exchange students, an earring given to me on my fifteenth birthday by my best friend lost at camp, a plastic muppet figurine from Burger King lost over the side of a ferry at the beach, a watch I bought in New Orleans lost during a one-night-stand. I have listed these things to myself, over and over. I can remember the moment of losing or finding out the loss vividly. I have a great need to think about it.
And I’m beginning to realize that that’s what this scarpbox project may be about as well. It isn’t just about collecting memories and totemic items, but about making sure they are not lost. It is about that old, old fear, the one I seem always to have carried with me, that somehow if I lose things from myself – whether it’s just some thing, or my “special blanket,” or a memory itself – I will lose myself.
My sense of self is built upon adding: one of the few visual representations of an idea I carry with me is an old one of a self as a kind of dust-devil or whirlwind. At first I am just an indistinct cloud of dust, but as I whirl over the ground, over time, I collect things into myself – encounters, others, things, memories, feelings, knowledge – and these things begin to form a shape in the dust, the shape of me. I, my self, my subjectivity, is a composite of the things I have contacted in my life. I am only revealed through addition.
No wonder, then, that I would be terrified of losing things from that self. If I start dropping bits and pieces out of the whirlwind, I will again become indistinct. Just a cloud of dust, not a me. And thus the scrapbox. I’m realizing that this project has become, or has always been, one more item in the fight against loss. It is a way both for me to prevent the loss of memory, and to document those losses that do surround me in life, most especially loss through time. This project seems to be obsessed with those losses that occur simply because time goes on. By documenting those losses, though, perhaps I will be able to come to terms with them. I will not need to keep listing them over and over. Maybe, though this, I can make even those losses additions to my self. I can let even the absences be a part of me.
"In ninth grade," I'll say, "I loved her desperately. She had soft red hair, a womanly figure, and a defined southwest Virgina accent. We spent days being absurd, she fuelled by drugs (though I didn't know/didn't admit to knowing it at the time), me by natural insanity. There were a thousand absurd running jokes, like one where we would just shout 'Yellow Dog!' in the middle of everything. She would take me by the arm and pull me with her, and we would talk about nothing in the dark corner by the stairs, she leaning on me or sprawling out across the floor.
"In eleventh grade she became pregnant and had an abortion. The day she found out about the pregnancy I found her crying outside the theater building.
"'What's wrong?' I asked, putting my arm around her shoulders. 'Something bad,' she answered. 'Can I help? Do you want to tell me?'
"'No,' she said. 'It's too bad. It's really really bad. Someone like you couldn't understand.' Then she took off the pretty sunflower hair-clip she was wearing and put it in my hair. 'Here,' she said. 'You keep it. It looks better on you anyway.'
"She walked away and turned the corner around the side of the building. I never saw her after that. Years later, I wonder if she gave me that clip because she saw in me the child she would never be again."
It's a sad story. It's a really sad story, and I'd never even realized how sad it was until I wrote it down. And there are a bunch of them like that. So many of the things I need to write down seem to end "I never saw her after that."
"We never really talked after that year."
"I lost track of him. Years later I saw him in the grocery store, skeletally thin. I wondered if he were sick, but didn’t know how to ask, or how to tell him that I’d missed him all these years."
"That was the year we grew apart, me jealous of her affection for others, she afraid to give up any of the ground she was gaining."
Even when I'm writing about something more discrete -- a Weekly World News from the summer we lived in the Charlottesville apartment, for instance -- I seem to manage to make it part of a larger sad story. Not just "Jessica used to bring home the Weekly World News, which we pored over in delight," but "it was one of the few things that distracted us from the general misery and loneliness that summer. It seems to me to alternate between moments of hilarity gathered on the living room floor around the television or some ridiculous object, a muted feeling of emptiness and the impossibility of connection, and a desperate love for Nick."
This is not a happy way to tell that story. I could say something more positive -- something like "we all struggled, I think, with feeling out of place that summer, but nontheless managed to come together over television, TetrisAttack, Trivial Pursuit, the Weekly World News. We were a community, even in an environment that felt alien even while we inhabited it." That's (at least slightly) more happy. It focuses on the positive more.
But I don't seem to want to tell that story. And I'm wondering why. I don't think, generally, I've had a sadder life than most people. In fact, I think I've been enormously lucky to have a happier life than many people so far.
So why am I telling these sad stories, and why am I telling them this way? It might have something to do with who I am right now, for one thing. I am struggling now with a loss of connection and a difficulty in feeling meaningful, just as I was the apartment summer, just as I was in ninth grade. That may have an effect on how I view even the happy times I'm documenting.
But more than that, I'm afraid, I'm finding out that this is not just a scrapbook project for me. I think perhaps it's a journal of loss. Not necessarily always the loss of people (I have, thanks be to God or to luck or to those I love, lost relatively few people in my life), but the loss of time. And the loss of myself.
I have always, as far back as I can remember, been obsessed with loss and with losing. I have an over-developed fear of losing objects, even objects that are not precious to me. It’s the idea of losing itself that obsesses me. I have a very early memory, for instance, of watching “Snow White” for the first time. I can’t have been more than five at the time. The witch was moderately scary, and the fake-death of Snow White a little so as well, but what completely preoccupied me throughout the movie, and what I can still remember with the deep feeling of anxiety I had about it then, is that when Snow White is fleeing through the woods, she has a red bundle with her, presumably the most important things she took from the castle. But when she reaches the dwarves’ house she doesn’t have it anymore.
Somehow, along the way, she has lost her bundle. This to me, at the age of five, was even more terrible than any of the other events, because it indicated that Snow White had lost everything dear to her. How could a house full of dwarves or a mysterious handsome prince make up for that? Her home, her childhood, her sense of security, even her parents were gone. She had lost her bundle, lost the things and memories that made her who she was – a princess, a daughter, a child. I felt awful for her.
I can list you, even today, virtually every thing I have lost, because I hate losing so much. A ring lost at a party for our foreign exchange students, an earring given to me on my fifteenth birthday by my best friend lost at camp, a plastic muppet figurine from Burger King lost over the side of a ferry at the beach, a watch I bought in New Orleans lost during a one-night-stand. I have listed these things to myself, over and over. I can remember the moment of losing or finding out the loss vividly. I have a great need to think about it.
And I’m beginning to realize that that’s what this scarpbox project may be about as well. It isn’t just about collecting memories and totemic items, but about making sure they are not lost. It is about that old, old fear, the one I seem always to have carried with me, that somehow if I lose things from myself – whether it’s just some thing, or my “special blanket,” or a memory itself – I will lose myself.
My sense of self is built upon adding: one of the few visual representations of an idea I carry with me is an old one of a self as a kind of dust-devil or whirlwind. At first I am just an indistinct cloud of dust, but as I whirl over the ground, over time, I collect things into myself – encounters, others, things, memories, feelings, knowledge – and these things begin to form a shape in the dust, the shape of me. I, my self, my subjectivity, is a composite of the things I have contacted in my life. I am only revealed through addition.
No wonder, then, that I would be terrified of losing things from that self. If I start dropping bits and pieces out of the whirlwind, I will again become indistinct. Just a cloud of dust, not a me. And thus the scrapbox. I’m realizing that this project has become, or has always been, one more item in the fight against loss. It is a way both for me to prevent the loss of memory, and to document those losses that do surround me in life, most especially loss through time. This project seems to be obsessed with those losses that occur simply because time goes on. By documenting those losses, though, perhaps I will be able to come to terms with them. I will not need to keep listing them over and over. Maybe, though this, I can make even those losses additions to my self. I can let even the absences be a part of me.
Labels: death/mourning/corpses, lonliness
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