The box, or, Letters from my ex's

I keep things. Even things I have absolutely no need of. I guess it comes from having antique dealer parents, but I think that's an easy answer--they threw away as much trash as they did keep antiques. Maybe it's because I'm an archaeologist, and I want to preserve a material record, even one as mundane and trivial as mine. But of course, I've been collecting for as long as I can remember, much longer than I ever considered archaeology as professional (ha!) activity.

Honestly, I have no idea why I am such a packrat--like anything in life, it's tied into a whole series of personal and social processes that I'm only vaguely aware of. Peering into my brain a little bit, I'd probably say that it's because I'm terrified, constantly, of the way the world changes indifferent of my desires, and that holding onto things is a way for me to defray that fear, and root hope in things that mean something to me beyond the moment of their arrival in my life. This idea may sound a little far-out, but everytime I meet people who show me their collections of things, whatever they may be, I believe it more and more, and begin to think that the one thing that most of us share is terror at the changing world.

I have a box. I made it for a class project in high school--a poetry project as I recall. Here it is:

Yeah yeah...it's from high school. Black paint? check. Skull? check. Poetry? Check? Cliched teen angst? Check, check, and check.

After I got it back from my Language Arts teacher, it went onto my bookshelf and stayed there for the rest of my high school (and college) years. I guess I just kind of liked the damn thing, and as morbid and fucked up as high school is, it fit my temperament.

Gradually, I started putting things in it...well, not just things. Tokens really...mementos of relationships. Letters, pictures, drawings--basically anything that a girl gave me while we were dating/talking/hooking up/etc.... anything that had been part of any relationship of ours that had ended. This continued into college, and whenever I'd come home, I'd bring stuff with me and put it in the box.

Today, it looks like this:

I want it gone--out of my life, settling the past and living in the present moment. I'm in a healthy, stable relationship now, and I feel the need to commemorate that by jettisoning this collection of oddities from my life. These memories have made me who I am, but I want who I become to come from my life with my girl, and with all the humor and pathos in this box safely nestled in the past.

Plus, the last time I put something in it, the lid split open, and that seemed like a pretty good omen.

Thus, I get the eternal dilemma of all packrats--what to do with stuff that you're getting rid of. I guess I could just throw it in the trash, but that seems too easy, and too cheap for the amount of emotion and growth that lives in that box. The archaeologist in me wants to bury it, and leave it for some enterprising grad student to write a thesis on the idiotic cliches of late 20th century adolescents. But then the question is where? Iowa? My house out here that I won't be living in in five years (PhD gods be praised)? Somewhere else?

Perhaps I need a ritual...some procedure to grease the wheels of the cosmos. Usually fire is involved in rituals, so maybe cremation is the answer. But that seems too final for the lessons I've learned from all those years of crying and laughing over letters from people who's hearts I've broken or who've broken mine.

Thus, in true Creative Commons fashion--I put these ideas out there for remixes. What do we do with memories, even tangible ones like these? How do we wrest them from all those moments that were and transform them into the present moment?

Any and all ideas are appreciated, and if I get any good ones, I'll post pictures of whatever I end up doing.

Comments

[DHP]

You pose some interesting questions. I've been mulling similar possibilities for disposal of my life's footnotes. As one who cites sources for a living, a fire does indeed too final. Burial may be fitting, but again: where? Maybe a funeral by sea? Boston harbor? I'll think on it for a while.