As I’ve been filling trash bags with the debris of my life, I’ve also been clearing my head of the same.
I’m not laboring under the misconception that this move to California will suddenly result in a “new me,” but I certainly hope that it is a start in a new direction. And throwing away faxes, discs filled with emails and IMs, and other evidence of past relationships is proving to be more cathartic than I realized.
I’ve kept things like this since 1992 when I first fell in love with Jann, thinking that it was romantic and that one day it would be sweet to look back at the beginnings of our relationship. Of course, that relationship didn’t go in the direction that you’d expect in the first blush of love, and I rarely ever looked at the stuff. The same goes for the stuff from B. that I’ve kept in a little box; I think those items will meet the trash can soon as well.
I think that I have finally realized the futility of keeping these things. I still have years of memories swirling around in my head, memories that mean so much more than the mere evidence of paper and computer disc. It’s all been baggage, both figuratively and literally.
Maybe the discs, entombed in a plastic bag in a landfill, will survive to be dug up by a future generation, who will still remember how to access the data; when they read the love letters filled with double entendres and outright smut, they’ll imagine — like I did — the torrid love affair that must have lasted a lifetime.
