I'm bad at letting go. When I was a kid my grandpa gave me 500 Danish crowns one summer. It was a lot of money and I wanted to treat it solemnly. I couldn't imagine buying something like a toy or candy with it, though those were the only things I really wanted at the time. I saved it instead. I took it back to America, thinking I would wait until there was something really special to use it on, something that would then become a physical keepsake of my grandpa. I put the bill into a book, keeping it pressed and in perfect condition.

Years went by and I couldn't think of anything to buy, the longer I waited the more attached I became to the bill itself. Soon it looked less like money and more like an ornate shred of art from that country, I could see all the little dotted lines swirling around one another to form the picture of royalty. The bill itself started to become the keepsake and I wound up never spending it. Once it became symbolic, I couldn't deal with the idea of converting it into something other than what it was.

I got a new cell phone last week. In moving everything over from my old phone I encountered one hurdle. I can only bring around 30 of my saved text messages from my old phone. Which is a problem because I've got close to a hundred old texts, received and sent, that I've held onto like little emotional trinkets.

Most of the texts are from the last woman I was seeing. I sent a text to my friend P on Saturday to see if he knew a way I could save all the old texts intact (without forwarding them and losing the original sender and time stamp) and he immediately sniffed out what I was doing. "Do you really think that's a good idea?" he wrote me back. "What's that going to accomplish?" I've got lots of saved stuff, I protested, not just from her.

There's one text I got from J two years ago. "The avocados are freezing but it is good for the wine, life is good." I remember the night she sent it to me. We spent the first few months of our friendship hooking up here and there. I started to fall for her and took her out for dinner one night (which consisted of a cheese plate and a few glasses of wine). I told her I wanted to be her boyfriend, though I was careful to phrase it in an adult way with lots of parentheticals and qualifiers. "That's not going to happen," I remember her telling me.

A few months later, after we hadn't seen in each other in a while, I remember getting that text late one weeknight. I was sitting at the desk in my bedroom writing a videogame review of something called "EA Playground." The text came unprompted, a small reminder of the lingering fondness still between us. So I saved it, to remember that moment we had, which was left behind. A little rag taken from a time and place where I used to be but can't go back to.

I've got folders in my email account created to save old emails from women in my past. I've still got a bankers box in the closet that has the one letter I ever got from the first girl I fell in love with. She wrote it to me from a summer school class while she was trying to learn how to type. The whole thing was printed in dot matrix, except for her signature, which had a little heart looped into the cursive.

Now I have a dilapidated old flip phone with a bunch of old text messages trapped inside, little flags, moments that I might otherwise have forgotten by now. Looking back over them, trying to figure out which should be deleted, permanently tossed into digital oblivion like abandoned binary rags, I remember one of the last nights she was here. I rented a car and drove into the countryside to see her one last time. We stayed up until 5AM, walking by the house she grew up in, seeing the deli where the Russian vendor used to give her free piroshki because she was so pretty.

When the sky started to lighten it was time to go. I drove back into the city, feeling like I was in a narcoleptic quicksand, trying to keep awake just long enough for the hour drive to the rental place. After I dropped off the car, I stumbled into the BART and rode back to my neighborhood. As I sat down I sent her a text, saying that I had survived the drive and was safely returned. I closed my eyes and leaned my head against the glass window and put my iPod on shuffle. I remember the song that was playing, something I hadn't heard in years, "Gates of the Garden" by Nick Cave. I started crying. It felt like I was losing an organ, but there was no physical pain, it was all brain sadness and numb body.

A week earlier, I sent her an entire sonnet as a text. I remember sitting at my desk after lunch, copying three lines into a single text, then saving it as a draft so I could copy the other lines and send the whole thing at once. I remember making sure to start with the last three lines and work back to the beginning so that she could read it in order. The first time she told me she loved me, it was in a text message.

It's been nine months since she left. Before I got my new phone I hadn't looked at any of those old texts in months and now I'm going to have to start deleting. Many of those scraps are going to wind up left behind. I don't want to let them go.

"Still think you are cool :-)" I remember the night she sent it to me. I remember the one I sent to her that it was responding to. Click. Now it's gone.

 

Previous Posts:

Love Machine: Going to Bed Angry

Love Machine: The Hooker on the Corner

Sex Machine: Having Sex on Inauguration Night

Sex Machine: If You Can Get Me Hard I'll Show You A Good Time

Date Machine: Tool Academy, or Watching TV with Your Girlfriend

Sex Machine: Getting Laid

Love Machine: I Was a Six Year-Old Virgin, or Is There A Happy Ending?

Date Machine: Getting Pierced on a Date

Love Machine: Hitting Snooze on the Morning After

Date Machine: Let Me Seduce You With The Cardigans

Date Machine: I'm Too Sexy For Your Blog

Love Machine: Breaking Up Is Hard To Do, or Leaving Home

Date Machine: Super Macho Man Slumber Party

Sex Machine: Having Sex in Your Parents' House During the Holidays

Date Night: Trying to Behave on a Boring Coffee Date

Sex Machine: Sex with Older Women, or How I Would Make Love to Gloria Swanson

Love Machine: Using Your Words, or I Like Pap 

Date Machine: Drunk Emailing with J, or How To Fail at Seduction 

Sex Machine: Listening to the Neighbors Have Sex 

Date Night: In Which I Try To Believe In Aliens 

Date Machine: Rate My Pick-Up Lines Redux 

Love Machine: Loyal as a Dog