Monthly Archive for April, 2008

First, given the title, I’m not actually doing another closing out of the site and whatnot. It refers to something a lot deeper. What this is about is doing one of those cathartic things they always tell you to do, but generally  goes completely against who I am. I have my past – my hurts, my sad stories, my hauntings and it’s my thing, or it has been for a good long while. A lot of it comes down to the things I keep in this medicine bag – items that generally remind me of some of those key moments in my history. This particular thing represents the closing out of those things, of my reliance on or addiction to them and signifies the main end of my minimalizing process, in which I cleaned the skeletons out of the closet with the old shirts.

When I wrote “Why I hate Breakups” and managed to make Cassie amazingly mad at me she mentioned that any hope of a future was gone – that she had buried it in the backyard by the fence. I’m not sure it’s possible to bury the future, but as I went through pages, pictures, trinkets, journals and whatnot over the last few days I came to grasp what influence the past had on my life and the terrible realization of how much history I have repeated. A lot of things went into the trash this week – a lot got boxed up to be out of the way, but the finality of it comes in the form of an old metal box that I put those essential representations in and, you guessed it, buried in the backyard – by the fence. Along with these things was supposed to go this letter I wrote, a reflection of sorts:

15 April 2008

The medicine bag was bought at a store in the mall sometime when I was around 16 or so, if I remember. It’s a simple light deerskin piece that I used to wear about my neck. Eventually it would collect memories: trinkets that serve as reminders of memories past. These are little things – if you looked at them you would think them fairly insignificant, but each carries with it memory powerful enough to drive me to my knees when I hold it. Perhaps it is for that reason above all others that these things need to move on, as do I – I’ve gained little from them other than reminders of a past that nothing can be done for.

There was an acorn in the bag once that I found around the first day of fall, but it passed along some time ago – I’m not sure when. It had fallen off a tree near the back entrance of Cypress Creek high school and I picked it up. It used to be that the acorn itself reminded me of those years -the fever years of post-adolescence in that strange moment between childhood and adulthood where everything exists in an exponential height of emotion. It won’t be going into the ground, but perhaps it left beforehand because I had passed over the longing for those years.

There is a perfectly smooth quartz in the bag -a shard. It recalls a search for faith, magic (or, to some degree, magick) and theology. It brings into memory years attempting to understand the great thereafter question: what next? It reminds me of the time I spend studying, reading, thinking and attempting to understand the nature of religion, belief and the passage into my own ideals, which have molded here and there. I think the names that I placed on such things have been fading over the last few years, giving way to a contentment with the passage and pull of that force which all religions turn to: the answer to the why. Most of my altar has dismantled and placed in the memory box: the faith and understanding remains, but the ritual never involved the incense burners and oracle cards – all exist as a way to try and communicate with, or understand, something higher, as is the way of belief systems. This object of that journey passes smoothly and without sadness, but rather with greater understanding and a contentment that nothing will ever be fully understood, but will remain.

Here we have a shark’s tooth necklace – the leather for it lost long ago. It is a gift from Christine, a pen pal who, for a moment in time, was something more. A girl I barely knew in Jr. High (7th Grade) who I would begin writing back and forth with when she moved to North Carolina. The story told in those letters resembles a lot of the plots of films or romances – a journey of two people beginning with little knowledge of one another and traveling through the coming of age. We talk, we have an intimacy of knowledge, I watch as her life changes as does mine. We fall in love, to a degree and await being able to see each other, but we change – we begin to have different ideas and our lives become a chasm that the writing won’t cross anymore. When she comes to see me, we barely spend time together. After that years pass before a final letter comes nicely, then fades away. I talked to Christine recently – she seems well. Her story is one that speaks to me of idealistic youth and understanding that people grow into who they will be. The shark’s tooth passes its bittersweet memory of years with only a minor bite, one we all must endure at some point, I think. It also is unique in the reminder of the fact that our little friendship and fleeting romance was possibly one of the last few of our age in this society to be carried on through post – these days, whith email, webcams, voice over IP and no long distance charges it would never have drawn that longing anticipation for a letter that was the nature of things in years past.

There are two for the next story: a famous one among my friends, or perhaps a notorious one. This one is about Alissa, a girl I became very close to in the middle teenage years of my life. A girl troubled, suicidal and running a phenomenal downward spiral for her age that I attempted to help pull back for a moment in time. To a degree I succeeded in this or, rather, I succeeded in letting her know that someone cared enough to pull back for a time. We shared a moment in time of happiness brief but compounded into absolute glory by that fire that can only exist in teenage years. No sex there, folks, it was only a kiss. Perhaps in my previous romantic nature this is what made it even more fantastic, but it might have also been my undoing. It was shortly thereafter I found that a friend of mine was with her and had been for a while – that she had deliberately deceived me. In the end I had to forgive him – he was just as surprised, to a degree, to find that she and I spent time together, but I did not forgive her and I would not for years. I completely cut contact with her, not even to express disappointment, and selfishly scoffed when I further heard that her situation once more worsened at a more alarming rate. Eventually she switched schools and I no longer saw her at all, but I always wondered. In later years I felt a fool for acting as I did and sometime would attempt to find her. It wasn’t until nearly seven years later that I got an email out of the blue from her apologizing for all those years ago – asking if I could ever forgive her. I forgave her immediately and perhaps I had a few years before, but did I forgive myself? I think not. I apologized to her, she said that I had every right to act that way. We exchanged emails, she seemed well and generally better. All the while, she continued to ask my forgiveness. That winter, she had planned to be in Houston during the same time I would be – she wanted to meet Misty and Malikai (Isabella was not yet born at this point). To hear her voice was a ghost talking out of years past and sounded as such – perhaps hind sight is 20/20 in that. She still talked about the old days, thanked me for always caring, and apologized. I tried to tell her everything was alright. At some point she cried. We never saw each other. The people she was staying with apparently had booked her plans too tightly and she had returned to stay with her boyfriend in Seattle. I told her that was alright – there would be another time. Before she hung up the phone, she said “Thank you for loving me.” – I can hear it right now. After not hearing from her for two months I emailed her to see if things were alright. It was her boyfriend, if I remember, who called Misty on a night I was working and told her he had just gotten my email and that Alissa was dead – that she had killed herself. The funeral had already passed.
The objects of Alissa’s memory, the only ones that I have, are a rock – perfectly smooth. It’s slashed and speckled in greens, reds and blacks. Alissa had brought it for me from the Rocky Mountains – she said she had found it above the tree line amidst many other dusty and otherwise plain looking stones. Sitting there, different than all the rest and shining, she said it had reminded her of me. The other is the last cone of an incense I found that was the exact scent she and I used to burn in her room – a scent I do not know the name of that instantly invokes memories of tears, laughter, stories and self-deprecation. Not for one moment have I ever forgiven myself for not remembering who Alissa was; for not knowing on that phone line why she wanted to be forgiven, for not seeing the signs of a farewell. Whether I know rationally that it was not my doing, I have carried her ghost for more than ten years now. The stone passes with the weight of the mountain it came from. The incense I will burn and say farewell – I cannot carry it any longer.

There is a blue press-on fingernail and a slightly bent band of white gold that await next. The nail was given to me by Misty in the first day or so that we knew each other – a fierce roller-coaster tumble into love, into the acceptance that would give me my children. The nail, an insignificant thing, I think speaks to the nature of my view of the small things – that something given is never trivial. The band was given to me on my birthday to be worn as a wedding band because we never had a wedding. I wore that band until around two weeks or so after she left, then I put it into the bag, vowing to return it to my finger when she returned to me. After years, I did let go completely of Misty, though, being the mother of my children, she has not left my life. There is a melancholy that comes with these things – a memory of years spent too much on wishful thinking, of being an “insufferable optimist” – with no regret. My children came from these things and while the memories and fetters of them may pass to the earth, the children continue to be a joy. Along with these passes a letter, a poem called “Secrets” that Misty wrote to me or to herself when she first felt that she loved me and told me secretly.

Next comes a woven band of jasmine or some other fragrant plant given to me by a free-spirited girl named Melanie, a squatter who blew in and out of my life like the wind during one of the darkest parts of it. It reminds me of her, and it reminds me of that time – a dark spiraling period of feverish months spent in and out of obsession, insanity, pain and self-degradation. Years later I still feel the aftershocks of that feeling, that dark panicking anxiety that has ruled my life in the months following every loss, every betrayal that I have endured. Ever since Alissa, I have found myself staring into that abyss again, given only a reprieve here and there for a time. The hooks of black steel from those depths have gripped me these past few days every step of letting these things go. This band passes to bind that darkness away and to help me forgive myself and, with hope, starve the beast back into the abyss.

We come to the final story. Two things here that will be listed out of order. The first is a letter written to me by Cassie from her visit to her grandparents’ house. She had asked that I write her a letter to take with her and she had written this to me over the period of days she was there. It’s a wonderful letter, with the understanding that we needed the break, but with hope for the future, excitement with one another and love. I’m not sure she had even said she loved me by then. She says she sleeps with the letter that I had written her and the sappy valentine I had given her – longing for that goofy fluffy pink unicorn. Reading over this letter closes my airway and makes my skin seem to burn. I haven’t seen her in three weeks since I told her I couldn’t see her. I tried to look at the history of our relationship and tell myself that I had improved in many ways, but in cleaning things out I came upon a journal I had written during the time of my breakup with misty, reflecting on our relationship and found that many of the mistakes I made in both were too similar. I some fashion I managed to upset Cassie to the point of her stating there was no hope for a future – that she had buried it in the backyard by the fence. I have often wondered since if she was stating it literally; if there was some representative object of a memory, like that unicorn, that she might have physically buried. At least it was an inspiration for this idea. I don’t think I’ve improved much – I still try and check her online pages – when I see a new picture my heart jumps into my throat event though I’ve never thought her pictures really looked like her. With the letter is an object somewhat like that blue press-on nail, a trinket given to me by Cassie in the very early days of our relationship: a milk tab. She collected them and happen to bestow one upon me. At the point in my life I was, I was jaded and had a very poor opinion of relationships – still not being fully past Misty. Feigning an love of the single life that I would carry long into our relationship like a shield to protect myself from the fear of being hurt again, still as much as I believed that nothing more than a few dates or so would come of it, I found myself keeping the milk tab because the ring attached to it fit Cassie’s ring finger perfectly – a thing that scared me to death, that hit me in a place I felt too close for comfort whether I liked it or not. Today is two lunar months passed since she left and one day from two calendar months. As far as I know she has come to the place where the negative wins out – she has moved on.  I never know anything that goes on with her and she has taken steps to make sure of it, though still I don’t look too deep into that abyss: I already know too well what will be looking into me. Through these cleaning days that began last weekend I have seen the echoes of my past, heard the ghosts whisper and re-read a collection of stories that all end the same way with the same moral that I never seem to learn and it is for this reason that I put these things into the ground with the greatest weight of all, greater even than Alissa’s stone – that I, stubborn and unwilling to go against my own personal beliefs on how I presume to think things should be handled in these situations, always manage to say the wrong things, to act on the wrong instincts. So I place them in the ground with a resignation to the fact that I don’t know – that maybe I never did, but that either way whatever comes in the future cannot be marred with black marks from the past.

All of these things, sealed into a metal box along with a copy of this should someone want to wonder about these stories years ahead, will sit with me tonight as the children sleep, as Alissa’s last incense cone burns down to ashes and I will let their memory blow out with the smoke and realize that I do not need them anymore – that those memories have been weighed and understood, but can no longer be carried as chains for a ghost. I’ve spent the last months, including those up to when Cassie left, uncertain of many things and making strong changes in my life. So these bits of the past, small and rattling among ashes in a metal box but carrying the weight of some 13 or so years will go into the ground – buried in the backyard by the fence.

– GHosT

I never actually put a copy of the note in there as  I said I would – I forgot. If someday someone happens to dig up the box, they can just guess at it – if they were anything like me they would probably understand. There are a few things to arrange in the garage here and there and stacks of papers to go through and file or throw out, but cleaning up, the most cleaning I’ve ever done as far as stuff goes, is pretty much over at this point, aside from the minimal decorating and eventual changes to some things that would cost money I don’t have. Will I really change? I hope so. I don’t think I can do this cycle again – something had to give. The obsession, the anxiety, the head-circles have to stop here – I sat there on the porch with Alissa’s incense burning down, I said my goodbye and I buried her. In case you wanted to know, I’ve never visited her grave, but I have seen her death certificate. I have never known the circumstances if her suicide, but I didn’t kill her. I was a kid and, even at 21, I wasn’t that much more inclined to know such things for sure.

So I’ll leave you with a blast from the 80s that I’ve loved since I was a kid, which has some bearing on the situation, and I’ll return later.

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