My box of stuff fell apart. Wait, backup.
I have (had) a box of stuff-- letters and cards and documents and all the thoughts I used to put down on paper before I had this here online diary thing-- that I carried around with me for the last twenty-odd years; and the box disintegrated.
You know what you have laying on the floor when your box of stuff falls apart? Well for one, really bad poetry. Dear God the worst fucking poetry...worse still when you check the dates and do the math and realize you were not, as the hackneyed illusions would suggest, seven years old. And pictures of bands you used to manage, old scripts from theater troupes you used to work with, one's first crack at third person narrative *shudder*. There are postcards from girlfriends on vacation with lovers they haven't spoken to in ten years. You find amazing (even now) artwork given as gifts from people who didn't then, and do not currently, consider themselves 'artists'; and who are wrong, on both counts. You find birth announcements, a picture of your best friend in the ninth grade, ticket stubs, and a recipe for something you've been making blindfolded for fifteen years buried underneath a lighting script for a show that lasted a single day. An ode to River Phoenix, a mixed tape you never sent to a boy you had a crush on whose name you cannot remember, Christmas cards from now-dead grandmothers, and nude photographs of yourself.
At this moment I cannot, honestly cannot say if my life has been more full than I perceived it to be; or has been more empty than I have been willing to admit. Either way, moral is: put your shit in a really, really sturdy box.
Posted by Antigeist at December 7, 2004 10:24 PM