Boxes of Ghosts and Burdens

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.