Desk neurosis
It's exciting and scary at the same time, this continual shifting, the feeling that bravery is required and I am up to it, or have to think that I am. I wish I could go into more detail , need people to share this stuff with, but I don't know how to do it safely. What am I capable of doing? How will facing my fears and going forward change my life? It's easy to speculate about it, much harder to do it, but I am almost there.
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In middle school I rifled through the drawers, looking for proof, for my mother’s journal, not hidden enough, somewhere in the bottom drawer perhaps. I opened it to look for evidence, to invade her privacy, to make sure that no one would leave me in the middle of the night. In it I found deep unhappiness starkly sketched. The journal verified my stepfather’s dislike of me, my role as a roadblock, the tight arguments they apparently had about my existence.
When she kicked him out two years later, she used me as an excuse.
Before I was aware of the desk, it traveled with my mother and me from apartment to apartment. It witnessed dead air, electric violence. When I was three years old, it came with us to live with a man named John. Here it absorbed fights and alcohol fumes, witnessed slaps and yells and John’s large hands moving toward my mother’s throat. Stoic, it watched as I stood at the dinner table night after night, the desk as silent as any adult in my life, foretelling my future. When my mother left in a hurry, me safely ensconced at my grandparent’s house, the desk migrated to the basement of John’s apartment building. Someone broke into it and stole all of my mother’s records, the Beatles, the Doors, the jazz albums that originally belonged to my grandfather.
She gave the desk to me when I got married the first time. It’s inhabited apartments and houses. I keep the checkbook in here, bills that need filing, old cell phones and computer cables. In the bottom drawer I keep old love letters that no one but me cares to read, the ephemera of what went before, when everything about life was unsettled but exciting all at once.
This bottom drawer contains emotions lost and volatile. I keep the journals my grandmother wrote after my grandfather was burned in an industrial accident, two notebooks of medical scares and bitterness, next to the love letters. Kevin’s teenage angst and poetry notebook lies on top of the burn diaries. The drawer contains them and so do I, these two suppressed lives gone, the words of the dead. I am the keeper of memory and severed connection, of history and sadness, of other peoples’ secret thoughts.
The desk holds hidden lives, realities experienced behind a mask. It reveals the deceptive moments when everything is either clear and bright and easy or muddied with uncertainty and censored thoughts, as if these were the only two possibilities that life and love offer. It holds privacy invaded, shows the way that thoughts living in isolation wither, how I hold on to our idea of other people without their input, keep them frozen in time.
I keep the evidence of infatuation and anger, the proof that once I dazzled strangers, that love and hatred interlink.
From the prompt "On my desk."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. This one was edited beyond the 12-minute prompt mark.