It's the first night I've felt like writing in a while, the first time I'm not up late watching TV or trying to sleep but actually just reading chapters over and over from childhood books or my old planners, months by month. I'm very tired, physically, from running a lot and stretching and doing rediculous! looking ab exercises with Emily and Abby. We all just lied on the living room floor on our backs on dirty bath towles and did thrusting motions to the beat of Ka'nan's Waving Flag. Occasionally Emily's mom or her wife (of the mom, not Emily's) would come in from the garden, laugh at us, and pick thier way to the bathroom or to get water.
After we got our exercise in, we looked at lists and things we'd made in high school. We were obsessed with making these huge (literally, we used a large roll of butcher paper and a few poster board) lists of things we loved and hated. Some things that seemed prophetic at the time now just seem banal ("I love: freedom, being right, pure sounds, being outside at night, talking to boys on the phone"). Some things seem pathetic in retrospect only ("I hate: not having enough money, that I want to be foreign" and the fact that most of the people on the I Love list were fictional characters, family members, or beloved teachers). Other things really get to the root of the problem ("I love it when someone figures out what they are trying to say, when you can understand directions as they are given"). And others you just have to laugh at (three different tries at spelling "dirreah," Sigmund Freud highlighted as "Leader #2," A certain unnamed person crossed off I Love and moved to I Hate.)
It was nice to look at the lists for giggles, but it also brought back very visceraly a time of my life three or four years or so ago. When we made them, these lists were the highlight, the pinnical, the absolute most articulate and interesting and organized and open about the things I loved and hated in this world. The free assocation, the loose placement of the words on the page, the varied hand writing: these are things that show me how I felt about making the lists. How helpful and clarifying they were. And of course the scattered and messy words themselves, how they showed what mattered to me. They brought up this very specific time in my life, the winter of 11th grade and the time I spend with Emily in those afternoons and weekends.
And reading that brown thick paper puts me there, reminds me of my motivations and how I felt and what made me mad or cheerful in that particular time. And of course seeing those things so clearly makes it easy to compare myself to my 11th grade winter self, to see the distances between the two.
Chuck Klosterman, one of my favorite opinion-makers talks about remembering a period of his life with the same eerie clarity in Killing Yourself to Live.
"What's so disquieting to me is how this kind of life- a life of going to joyless keg parties and having intense temporary aquaintences and spending most of one's time in basements and crappy rented aparements with five bedrooms- was once my life completley. Those were the only things I ever did. That wasn't part of how I lived, that was everything. But now its like those experiences never happend at all. I can recall having conversations with people in college that would seem impossible to have today (both in subject and overall tone)."He describes meeting a girl at a party and discussing the merits of Soundgarden album and then never speaking again.
"The whole episedoe now strikes me as random and innapropriate and inexplicable. But that used to be my life, all the time. That used to be my life, all the time. That used to be normalacy, and now that normalacy is completely over. Things like that will never happen to me again, even if I want them to. And I did not choose to stop living that life, nor did I try to continue living that life, I just didn't notice when it stopped....When you start thinking about what your life was like ten years ago- and not in general terms, but in highly specific detail- its disturbing to realize how certain elements of your being are completley dead. They die long before you do. "
So here Chuck's talking about maybe his sophomore year in college, a time whose details I'm intimately familiar with. I used to take a nap twice a week at 11 30 AM, I ate a ton of yoghurt, there was a constant fight in my life about vacuuming the stairs. Whenever I'd see a dog I'd get innordanantly happy, and I was trying to reduce my cheese intake. I spent hours at night in those basements and apartments and I once had a 45 minute conversation centering around Animal Collective's Strawberry Jam, an album I have never even listened to.
But those details are recent, and it scares me to think that they will get lost without getting caught on butcher paper of their own. For example, those Saturday nights with Emily in high school, we usually consumed huge bowls of cereal, watched two thirds of a movie, reviewed every single romantic encounter we had ever come accross, discussed how much we hated our fathers, and scared ourselveles thinking "the devil" was going to enter the room. We generally listened to The Smiths. I remember attempting to smoke weed one time, but we had made the cigarette of graph paper glued with honey, so I just ended up burning my hand and having to keep it in a bowl of ice water for two episodes of Will and Grace. And I can remember the emotions that went with those evenings, and I can judge those times objectively, but I think what's most important is those details, the little actions that pushed the clocks around.
But Chuck mentions that he doesn't notice when those things stopped and how other things replaced them. For me, I keep track of how and when habits drop away. And in my experience most of the time the changes and what cause them have been obvious. Being at college stopped the sleepovers and added the Strawberry Jam. The verbal honestly of improv made me less drawn to the release of butcher paper.
And of course, there's the geography. My life in Quito, the daily stuff you do for 20 minute periods that add up to an evening were different. I took a nap every Friday afternoon while Jimmy's metal band thrashed. I swam at my grandmother's house many day's after school and sat silently at the table while my uncles played online chess or read the paper. I read The Stranger articles that I'd opened on endless tabs. I stored money in my bra and shoes, never more than $50 in one place. I rode the bus standing up, listening to songs over and over. I ate ice cream almost daily. We'd come over to each other's houses at 7pm, eat french fries and chicken silently with host families, obsess about clothing and our bodies. We'd drink cane liquor and chase it with apple flavored soda. I'd take 2$ taxis to filthy clubs and eat shwarma. I watched hours of American TV sacked out on my back on my host mom's futon.
It's things like that, and rediculious conversations about the development of feminism with my grandma, answering "so, did you need to pee after you lost your virginity?" from my host mom, explaining Passover to a cousin, defending the fact that I looked fat to a neighbor, are things that seem absurd as I try to describe them here and I laughed at them when I pulled myself out of them and looked at it from Kalamazoo shoes. But in the situation, as it happened, it was normal, acceptable, expected. Before I went to bed that night, I'd usually be able to pull out of it to notice that that'd never happened before. But the next morning, and when I tried to write about it almost always, it was alreay old news. Of course I found an entire pig's head in the refridgerator. How else would I treat a headache besides herbs and a shower? Did it not always rain each night, was I not always afraid of being alone outside, did I not always eat hot dogs and drink fishbowls? My only home I'd ever known was on the corner of America y Caracas and the set of keys in my pocket could open the only door.
It's probably good that the brain can do this, can smooth over memories to make the past seem simple and the present seem sane. If I compare those three eras of my life, they all seem nuts to the way I live now. But as I return to any of them, as I did today, as I did for six months, and as I will once I set foot in Kalamazoo, the details will expand to normalicy and this present will slide backwards. I won't remember my interval-technobeat runs through Magruder Park. I won't remember being delighted to eat hummus again, to order a salad, to wear my green sneakers. It won't be important to me whether I drive Lester to school tomorrow or not. The snow melting, the mess in my room, should I donate this shirt to the thift store or not? will not matter one lick.
So I sit in those basements and bedrooms and do my little things, have conversations, interact, eat, prepare, study, rest, work, in the time-and-place-specific ways that we do. And most nights I'm siezed with the urge to write about it, to remember the routines that I completed, the behaviors I've been trained into. Maybe I put too much emphasis on my daily behavior. But to me, there's something important about not letting that stuff slip away. It's not so much to be remembered after I'm dead; its more to remember parts of myself that are gone while I go on living.
