In My Life
During the last months of college, I spent a lot of time reassessing my life.
What was it I wanted to do? Where did I want to do it? Who did I want to do it with? I took a lot of time to figure out who, after 22 years on Earth, I really was. It was all part of an effort to meet the “real world” with as little wind-resistance as possible.
Besides a journey through the land of introspection, this also included undertaking a massive streamlining effort in my surroundings — finally stripping myself of a lot of the baggage I’d spent a better part of my life carrying around.
Besides the requisite emotional baggage, I also needed to finally get rid of some of the material junk I’d been hoarding since childhood. This meant several trips to the local Goodwill to donate old clothes, selling off my comic book collection on eBay and sorting through boxes of class notes I’d saved for some reason now unfathomable to me.
It was during this purging of my personal life that I came across two heavy plastic storage containers that had sat in the back of my closet since I moved out of my parent’s house. These boxes contained a wide assortment of knick-knacks, pattywacks and other assorted junk that I had saved since I was young. While shifting through the boxes, I found rocks that had captured my attention when I was five years old, deformed action figures that had helped me learn about the destructive power of fire and a childhood’s worth of trapper keepers. I tossed what I thought I no longer needed and repacked those bits of childhood paraphernalia I felt I couldn’t possibly part with. The things I saved included my POG collection, early attempts at artwork and my Eagle Scout project workbook. Everything else went into the two trash bags I quickly filled with teenage waste.
Things I threw out included a miniature llama, a collection of Star Wars trading cards, the many certificates I had accumulated during my time with Nikki Rowe High School’s award-happy JROTC program and almost a dozen trapper keepers.
Buried in one trapper keeper, though, I discovered a vast collection of e-mail exchanges and handwritten notes I had saved from my time navigating the halls of middle school and high school. Presented with these correspondences for the first time in four years, I spent a few hours reading over them. The more I read, I partly grew wistful for the seemingly simpler times of grade school. Mostly, though, I grew more and more embarrassed at my angst-ridden high school writing style.
Reading the notes and e-mails really took me on a trip down memory lane – something this whole exercise was designed to prevent. I was supposed to be preparing myself for the future by cleansing myself of the past. Instead, here I was pouring over my childhood as if I was preparing an A&E Biography about myself.
For all too long, I have had a problem with dwelling too much in the past. I spend too many hours thinking about my regrets and dreaming about the roads not taken. Reading my library of letters brought back all of those feelings and I felt myself drowning in nostalgia.
I was so overwhelmed by regret — feelings I knew would only be counterproductive — I gathered up my notes, letters and, in essence, memories, put my past in a barbeque pit and dowsed it with lighting fluid. It turns out, though, I’m not too good at the whole lighting things on fire bit — even though my deformed action figures might disagree. It took me almost ten minutes, a quart of lighter fluid and a book of matches to get the notes burning. But once they did, boy it was wonderful.
As the flames engulfed the love letters, diary entries and mix tapes, it felt like the chains that bound me to the past were also melting off. Like handcuffs that were left on for too long, though, these chains did leave some scares.
A few scars are good, though, because as the Beatles sang, “There are places I remember all my life, though some have changed. Some forever, not for better. Some have gone and some remain. All these places had their moments. With lovers and friends I still can recall. Some are dead and some are living. In my life I’ve loved them all.”
Although it might seem like it, by burning those notes I didn’t turn my back on my friends and I didn’t symbolically down the bridges that built our friendship. No, by burning those physical manifestations of the past I felt like I was finally free to see the future’s light in a whole new way. Instead of destroying the memories I had with my high school friends, I destroyed the roadblocks that prevented me from making new memories and new friends.
As the notes burnt and the wind began to pick up the ashes and blow them into my face, I wiped off the smudges that had once been representations of love, loss and hope.
Maybe the physical notes are gone forever, or maybe, through the ashes covering my face and hair, I absorbed some of their molecules into my own body — taking the memories with me into the rest of my life; learning from the past and looking toward the future.
