We are in the process of trying to clean out a rather large basement and several storage units. I have been proud to say recently that only a few of the boxes in the basement are mine. It was true. When I moved two years ago I had simplified my life down to very few things. I liked it. If evacuating was something I ever needed to do I would be ready in less than 5 minutes. So when my mother called me from one of the storage units being cleaned out under her supervision I was shocked to hear her say, "I think there are a few boxes in here that are yours." No. It couldn't be. "Are you sure?", I questioned. She answered in the affirmative so I asked her to send them home with her and I would go through the boxes.
When my mother pulled into the garage I was waiting for her. There was no point in bringing this junk into the house. It must be terribly dusty and I had just cleaned the downstairs the day before to accommodate the Easter crowd. I pulled the three boxes out of her trunk and set them down on the floor of the garage. I pride myself in being an efficient cleaner, three boxes, I would be back in the house in a few minutes. I opened the first box and the first thing I saw was Barry Manilow's Greatest Hits. No, not a CD. I'm talking 33 and 1/3, an LP baby!!!
I wondered for a moment WHY it was still following me. Amazing how your things will do that. I bought that thing in KINGS on 29th street in Harrisburg. I rode my bike to the store and purchased it with my paper route money. The poor thing had been following me around for 34 years and I still hadn't managed to lose it. But that was it. That was the sum total of all the things in those boxes that were mine because once I removed that album from the top of the box everything else in those boxes were my daughter's things.
Going through her things it didn't take long at all for me to start to cry. Pictures of course, dance posters, dance programs, cards people had given her from her high school graduation, everything you can imagine with Ariel from the Little Mermaid, books, concert programs, ticket stubs, stuffed animals, costume jewelry, an old video game we had played to the very end together and her first Winnie the Pooh.
I thought briefly of the agony of always having to move forward and never having the option to go backwards, I hate it, but it is just the way this world is and I am trying to get used to the fact that my life doesn't have a rewind button. I heard the therapist say.
I recalled packing those boxes. My daughter went to college in September and by October I was gone. The condition of those boxes today reminds me of the frantic pace at which I packed them 5 years ago. I packed everything up as quick as I could. Stoically I recall. I didn't even take them to my new place. I put those boxes in a storage unit. This was part of the process. In my life at times like that when my brain should be exploding with grief and sorrow my mind grows frighteningly quiet and everything changes to "movie mode". Crouching down on the floor of the bedroom trying to hide as the monster is pounding on the windows to get in, I hear myself say aloud, "this almost seems like I am watching a movie." At my brother's funeral, "you're holding up really well." Why? It feels like a movie. It takes several days, weeks or even years sometimes for all my emotions to come flooding in and then like a child waking up from a nightmare I sit up and scream.
Where is everyone? Why didn't anybody wake me? Hey? WHERE DID EVERYBODY GO??? Don't leave me here all alone...with just ME!! Take me with you! PLEASE!!
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