Moving is stupid. I've had two months to get everything organized and I still wound up the night before with my four bags stuffed to bursting. After all the planning there remained a pile of scattered detritus, all the random crap that I wanted to take but couldn't find space for. I felt like a caveman staring at two sticks and kindling, trying to figure out if there was any other way beyond the obvious to accomplish what I wanted.
One of the things I've carried with me through every move since I left home is a plastic filling container that my mom gave me when I was sixteen. I've used it to store old letters, birthday cards, and scraps of writing amassed since my adjective-laden teenage years (one of these days I'll address that habit for real).
I looked at the beige plastic rectangle filled with old memories that I hadn't looked at in years. I knew it had to go.
I unfastened the flimsy metal clasp and dumped all the scattered papers out onto the floor. "Only the most important stuff is coming along," I thought.
A big proportion of all the old scraps were drugstore cards for various occasions: graduation, birthdays, Christmas, past moves. Cards I had received in the late 90's were oversized and ostentatious. They unfolded like small erector sets with paper scaffolding and puffy text written in sparkles. Inside these salutary behemoths were paper leaflets that unfolded like tablecloths. There was enough room to write a chapter in a novel, but most had a paragraph or less of handwritten text. "We love you!" "We're proud!" "Hope you have a great day!" "Congratulations!"
I threw most of them out.
Then I had the uncomfortable surprise of finding some old love letters to J which I never sent. I became friends with J my senior year in high school. My old English teacher told me she had a crush on me one day, and so I made an effort to talk to her. I was all elbows and awkwardness, which is why I think we never got past being friends. But I wanted to. We would wander through the newly-opened Barnes & Noble together. We'd sit at Krakatoa Café in the late afternoons, drinking black coffee and arguing about books.
We started emailing when we were in college, but she grew distant. She joined a sorority and became entrenched in her theater program. We were both surrounded by tens of thousands of new people and possibilities. The incentive to stay in touch dwindled.
Before I let go, I had one last flush of emotion. I was working at Yosemite for the summer between my first and second year of college. I felt like I was in an alien world most days, far away from the safely structured decadence of my college life. Not everyone was a middle-class kid on their way to a lucrative career sprung from an Economics major.
I would quote from the letter, but thankfully I'm writing this on a plane and it's tucked away in my checked luggage in the cargo hold below. Re-reading that letter to her, written in a nineteen year-old's emotional upheaval one desperate summer was mortifying. It was like looking at a terrible picture of yourself, with the lights and angles all wrong, so that you look like someone else entirely.
There can't have been any period of time when I was so needy and sniveling, so uncertain. So willing to make someone else an answer to all those adolescent wants, like a nostalgic voodoo doll for happiness.
It was three pages, front and back, on spiral-bound notebook paper. The last paragraph trailed off into an incomprehensible attempt to define what I wanted from her. It ended mid-sentence.
At least I didn't send it. It's hard to remember, it's so long ago now. But I must have reread what I had written and realized there was no way to send that to another person. I was a driveling teenage mess, and the fact that I was writing a rhetorical pitch for why we should make a go at romance together was a sure sign that our friendship had run its course. I wasn't talking to her anymore, I was writing to myself, spewing my own uncertain issues at the paper and planning to send them to her expecting a solution.
I never sent it, and I never heard from her again. But I brought that letter with me. It's gone from Yosemite, Fresno, Los Angeles, China, Madagascar, San Francisco, and now it's own it's way to New York, twelve years later. The dried up tissue paper from one summer when I was a wet teenage mess.
J, you were a lousy friend. And I was worse.
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Sex Machine: Talking About Sex With Your Parents
Love Machine: Willing to Relocate
Sex Machine: Checking my Oil, or the HIV Test
Date Machine: How To Pick Up a Bartender
Date Machine: Are You My Girlfriend Now?
PDA Machine: Making Out in a Bar
Sex Machine: The Cake is a Lie, or Does My Butt Show When I Walk?
Obituary Machine: Natasha Richardson, or Smoking Cigarettes on the Roof
Love Machine: Throwing Punches, or Get Your Hands Off of My Woman
Date Night: The Most Expensive Date I've Ever Been On
Sex Machine: Monogamy is for Losers
Sex Machine: I'm Not That Kind of Girl
Date Machine: Civil War and Sex on a Toliet
Date Machine: Living Like a Bachelor
Sex Machine: Chest Hair, or the Shaved Eunuch
Date Machine: Macho Voce, or Women Who Sound Like Men
Date Machine: Sex in the Office