Scrap heap
30 April 2011 07:10 AM Categories: Animal/vegetable/mineral
In preparation for the end times, I am expunging all my notebooks, am wiping the memory of my laptop clean. I will scrub down the bathrooms and mop the floors. My memorabilia – notes left on my doorstep, pining letters from old boyfriends, cards from the boy and the husband – will be gone through for the maudlin and inappropriate and that box of letters from high school where I sound like a fool, like a naïve nincompoop, is going up in flames.
I will build a bonfire in the backyard in the middle of the dry season, will underpin it with stained t-shirts and holey underwear followed by photographs that should be forgotten: me at 18 tipping a bottle of Captain Morgan down my throat, that guy down the hall in the dorms who looked innocent enough but wasn’t, a picture of the wall that I covered with ephemera in an attempt to express myself.
Would it be so easy to make it all go away, the evidence that I was weak and dependent and stupid. What I should be doing is embracing it, going back to support the former me, propping her up with kind words, with white lies, with the truth. “This won’t last forever, little girl, but it will haunt you. It will be a rich source of metaphor and scene, but you will also cry about it decades later and sometimes you’ll miss it, too, you will miss the intensity of it all, while wanting to go back and change it.”
I wouldn’t have believed myself either.
In preparation for the end times, I am leaving the notebooks alone, evidence for the weary. The photographs and letters and journals are stacked in boxes, proof of my earlier existence and a way of life gone. Destruction of artifacts does not erase the events they came from.
My grandfather would build a big bonfire every year in the backyard to get rid of scrap lumber and other things he no longer needed. The fire rose up as high as the tops of the Sassafras trees. He tossed in asphalt shingles, plastic toys, particle board. The family gathered to watch the flames lick the air. We breathed in the smoke, the toxins, which linger to this day, waiting for the moment of weakness to be written on the body.
Better to keep the old stuff, to let it wait for the moment of apprehension.
I will build a bonfire in the backyard in the middle of the dry season, will underpin it with stained t-shirts and holey underwear followed by photographs that should be forgotten: me at 18 tipping a bottle of Captain Morgan down my throat, that guy down the hall in the dorms who looked innocent enough but wasn’t, a picture of the wall that I covered with ephemera in an attempt to express myself.
Would it be so easy to make it all go away, the evidence that I was weak and dependent and stupid. What I should be doing is embracing it, going back to support the former me, propping her up with kind words, with white lies, with the truth. “This won’t last forever, little girl, but it will haunt you. It will be a rich source of metaphor and scene, but you will also cry about it decades later and sometimes you’ll miss it, too, you will miss the intensity of it all, while wanting to go back and change it.”
I wouldn’t have believed myself either.
In preparation for the end times, I am leaving the notebooks alone, evidence for the weary. The photographs and letters and journals are stacked in boxes, proof of my earlier existence and a way of life gone. Destruction of artifacts does not erase the events they came from.
My grandfather would build a big bonfire every year in the backyard to get rid of scrap lumber and other things he no longer needed. The fire rose up as high as the tops of the Sassafras trees. He tossed in asphalt shingles, plastic toys, particle board. The family gathered to watch the flames lick the air. We breathed in the smoke, the toxins, which linger to this day, waiting for the moment of weakness to be written on the body.
Better to keep the old stuff, to let it wait for the moment of apprehension.
From the prompt "In preparation."
Image: One of those old ephemeral envelopes, the contents of which would become kindling, evidence that I actually used the word "rad."
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