I've been living out these last few weeks in a physical Feng Shui state like metaphor. I've returned chaos back to order, sorted, de-cluttered, and discarded - much. Caught in the in-between of two lives I have found things that were easily and innocently misplaced. Not so much like uncovering a treasure chest, more like peeking between the floorboards and uncovering hairpins. Not just any hairpins, mind you, but the ones which slid between stacks of curls, your curls, holding each lock perfectly in place on that one perfect night. (Speaking of hairpins - remind me sometime to tell you the story of the prostitute's hairpins, perhaps valentines day -its a love story)
Of most interest I uncovered a cardboard box that has been shuffled from one place to another for so long that it has been warn soft with wrinkles and masking tape. Inside stacked heavy and high - stories, essays, poems, written in a dark, sometimes religiously saturated and often morbid if not macabre voice I almost didn't recognize. Some of these things date back as far as the Third grade lol and Most should be stacked a top a very hot pyre -totally. Though many of these were written within the last decade the voice struck me as foreign. It was really quite an odd and distant find. I hadn't recalled having won so many awards or even applying to college for creative writing in the first place, let alone the portfolio I sent in - or receiving a scholarship based on it. You' think having applications on the brain as of late it might have crossed my mind? The girl int he preppy short skirts and tall heavy doc martins was going to grow up and become a writer everyone said that - all the time.
While I remember in finite detail the moment when I "became" a history major (it was a moment that felt all warm and giggly and a lot like falling in love), I feel as though I am missing something important in not remembering the moment I stopped romancing the notion of writing a best seller on an old and loud type writer. Some people collect post cards, to remember where they have been, I collect moments down to the background music. I've been told it's just a quirk associated with how my memory works. But whether we realize it or not, whether we remember them or not, moments aren't returnable and you cannot give them away anyway - they stay with us all regardless of how detail specific we can nail them. Despite being emotionally a bit inept I do tend to be fairly good when it comes to peering into the small pin prick of clarity amidst an important one. I get their importance, maybe not exactly Why it was important but simply that it was. Of course the fact is most important moments are wrapped in disguise and enmeshed in everyday normalcy.
Having lost this one has forced me to consider my research - I don't do events, more or less I look at the interaction of ppl and life... what if there is no way to sift through an archive and pin point those life altering "moments" -the ones which end up directing the trajectory of life? Crap. What if all the research and footnotes in the world miss the truly important and singularly private moments that make all the difference in life. Crap.
Of course I have to wonder what it means to misplace ones voice or replace one with another? What if I never was a good writer and it was only that I had lived a life so different from most that I simply understood the world in different terms. How do you love something for so long that it becomes your defining quality... until one day in a moment you don't even remember it is simply gone?
And thus the quest continues for answers in the shadow of the valley where only questions grow.... In the mean time, I also found my Diadoras - mud still wedged between in the cleats.
