I
have a new office.
This
is pretty big news because it has been three years since last I had
more than a laptop caddy and an increasingly comfortable chair. Chair
upgrades are a must for sitting long periods, décor can come second.
The problem with setting up a new office is not so much the selection
of furniture and decorations, it is the unpacking of boxes that
haven't been opened for a few years.
The
boxes that are the most trouble are the ones that have been
transported from before the last move, or possible the move before
that. The boxes that have been left marked 'sort later' for nearly a
decade and contain all of the secret shames that you have long since
decided weren't worth dealing with but somehow have never gotten rid
of.
Boxes
laden with the ghosts of who you were. Phantoms of a version of
yourself that you might not want to acknowledge to anyone, not under
any penalty. Some of the phantoms are benign, embarrassing ghasts
from a time when you were younger and inexperienced and made the same
mistakes everyone else does.
Writing
mistakes are the first of the pernicious and overtly harmles spirits.
Hastily scrawled character traits, ideas for scenes and stories,
indecipherable nonsense like “With a pole in his pemarage” which
I wrote when I was 15 and still have no idea what I meant by it.
These are the things that you stare at and wonder if you have been
experience a series of strokes your entire life. Some complex partial
seizures that make you think all of the most terrible ideas are worth
foisting on a future version of you.
Then
there are the more powerfully haunting visages of lost loves. The
mistakes you have made in relationships that get left behind in the
forms of letters you cannot believe the sentiment of. Perhaps you
didn't mean it, perhaps she didn't mean it. Regardless, these are the
ghosts that make you wonder how you could have been so heart-foolish
and headstrong. I paw through these notes that tell me I am terrible
a few slips of paper away from the ones that tell me I am wonderful.
The hand is the same, the dates are misremembered, the effect is
off-putting.
Coupled
with these notes are the winnowing and wailing ghosts. The ghosts
that remind you of opinions that nobody holds anymore. Critiques on
writing that has gotten better while the people who wrote them long
since stopped writing. A printout of an email that someone sent you
because they were angry and bitter and tired and you were the most
obvious target. And somewhere in there you also find the notes that
reflect things that you had a chance to do and didn't do. Invitations
to weddings and parties not attended. Job invites or publisher
solicitations that remained unanswered. All of the things that you
could have done but somehow managed not to do.
Finally,
in the darkest corners you find morbid shadows obese with longing and
despair. These are the ghosts of bills not paid, of institutional and
corporate paperwork that got shoved aside and completely forgotten
about. I have just thrown away debt collection notices from 14 years
ago. Things I held onto because I always meant to call the number and
correct the problem. Foolish thoughts given that every six months I
receive a new collection notice for an ever-increasing amount from a
different letterhead. Sometimes I wonder how many people I actually
owe, other times I wonder if anyone actually owes anything.
Perhaps
debt itself is just a bad memory hurled upon the public.
So
I sort through eight boxes of this stuff and after two hours I am
left with just three. Just three boxes of old manuscripts, journals,
hand-written doodads. Twenty-three years of skeletons to digitize and
to apply to the current me. More than half of the baggage that I
carried with me has been cast aside. Useless stuff, vengeful crap,
things that were left alive to do their harm one more time before I
was willing to let them know that they have no hold on me, that they
represent nothing of who I currently am.
