Looking forward, looking back

Since it has been a while I feel like I owe an update, but truth be told there is little to update. As of last week we had our kitchen installed, sans countertops. The countertop drama, like the lighting and plumbing dramas before it, is both endlessly annoying and too unendurably boring to experience, much less relay.

But we forge fearlessly ahead, stubborn in the belief that we will actually move in the next couple of weeks, as unfounded in reality as the belief may be.

In that spirit, I have been steadily packing up my place. This is an exercise in self-reflection and discipline. I preach asceticism, but am not above keeping boxloads of nostalgic mementos. So yesterday, in an effort to reduce the amount of unpacking and organizing we will have to do on the other end, I gave myself a strict talking-to and set the arbitrary limit of one file box full of nostalgia.

This necessitated poring through no less than five file boxes in the damp, mildewy basement where, every fifteen minutes, the lights would automatically flick off, leaving me in pitch blackness. Each time I would have to stand on my cramped and numbed legs and flail my arms at the sensor to bring the lights back on to resume my excavation.

It seems at one point in my life I had nothing better to do than write page after page of letters to friends, spilling the most intimate emotional details of my life. Sometimes I wrote to write them and didn't bother sending them. Apparently, my friends also had nothing better to do that return these missives, often in cramped handwriting on both sides of crowded pages, no margins, or single-spaced and typed, back when people actually used typewriters.

I had bags full of cards form back when people sent actual cards, and boxes of photos, from back when you had to get your film developed, and each frame was a surprise when you got the little envelope back from the photomat.

I found markers of milestones in my life: love letters with outsized proclamations of finality, and break-up letters as cold and clipped as the love letters were overheated and expansive:
"Masanori," read one, dated July 28, 1998.

I will be moving shortly and we need to deal with the issues we left unresolved in January. You are in possession of many of my personal belongings as well as all of the items we purchased together... As of this time, I have not received any compensation from you though you remain in sole possession of those items....

That I happened to write it on his birthday was surely unintentional.


Dearheart," began another.

How could you let this happen, let me fall back into your arms, trusting completely in our love-- then just as I fell past the point of recovery, step deftly aside and say, 'I can't do this, sorry!'....The walks in the park, the lilacs and gifts, the lazy days and sheer, giddy joy of being so enamored of one another, grinning like fools...what went wrong? Darling, I miss you every day.

She was my first girlfriend and first real love. I was smitten beyond any sense of pride. I sobbed on my kitchen floor for days after she dumped me, paralyzed with my grief.

I found photos of me with long blond hair and heavy make-up, and photos with my oh-my-god-I'm-gay shorn hair, photos from trips long forgotten, photos of friends long lost. Chunky me photos, skinny me photos, cheesecake photos and topless-at-the-dyke march photos. Even photos me in drag with breasts bound and faux facial hair, complete with pretty femmes at my side.

I found notebook after notebook filled with numbers, what I weighed, how many minutes I exercised, how many calories I consumed. These notebooks were perhaps the steadiest presence throughout the 15 years or so chronicled in my boxes. In my my incarnations, in every city-- Boston or Bangkok, San Francisco or Jakarta-- I retained this ocd obsession with weight, food intake, exercise output.

I found lengthy letters from people I only vaguely remember being close to, and realized that even though at one point we poured every emotional detail of our lives out to one another, I have no idea who they are now or what has become of them. Because of my complete and utter refusal to be on facebook, there is little chance I will ever find out. But almost as compelling as these past relationships with people whose lives don't touch mine at all anymore, is the fact that I was all of those people, all of those girls. A straight girl, a wannabe butch, naked and sanguine in repose, and topless and angry on Fifth Avenue. What has become of all those incarnations of me?