Clinging

I’ve been staring at the blinking cursor for days. It mocks me with each flicker of black; motionless yet unrelenting. It taunts me.

I don’t feel much like writing today, but I have to get something – anything – out to clear the dust from my mind. I used to keep a journal when I was growing up. I would write for hours about nothing and everything.

Sometimes those entries would turn into mountainous stories of untruths just for the sake of writing. I would elaborate anything and everything in hopes that someday they may become truths.
The Boy I crushed on would realize just how irresistible I really was and we would run away together. The girl I disliked would lose her hair and gain mounds of zits and everyone would hate her.

(Ya, I was shallow like that.)

I only wish that I had kept some of those embarrassing tales to re-read now. I’ve kept quite a few things, but for some reason, those stories – as well as MY stories – never remained. All I have now is what has been committed to memory where I can only hope they persist for a long time to come.

As years go by I’ve begun to feel a sense of obligation to my marriage in that holding on to some of the old keepsakes from past relationships seems as though I long for what I had as opposed to what I do have. When we moved from our apartment to our current home, I unearthed a box of mementos from a past relationship. When I raised the lid, I was flooded with emotions from my once high school romance.

There were old ticket stubs, bottle caps, letters and pictures. Items I hadn’t seen in a few years and some I had forgotten about completely. As I held up a bottle cap, a smile cross my face as I remembered why I had kept it in the first place.

Feelings crept back that I thought had long been buried. A longing for what once was, a passion for the past became too difficult to bare.

I threw out that box during that move.

I have nothing left of that time in my life which shaped me and made me who I am today.

And while we’re packing and purging, preparing for yet another – hopefully our last – move, I’ve been clinging helplessly to items which remind me of other past moments. Items which really hold no significant value except in six degrees of separation.

Mike’s long accused me of being a pack rat. He is not one to hold onto items that in some way remind him of a time in his past. He’s not a sentimental person at all, therefore, he can’t understand why I have hospital bracelets from the kids, or their first hats stowed away in my night table. He doesn’t comprehend how saving the paper from their birthdays is of any importance.

(Those are the important items I’ve kept, of course.)

To him, my need to hold on to parts of the past is a nuisance and a hindrance on moving forward.

I see it as reflection, a lifetime is a long time and one cannot be expected to commit it all solely to memory.

Because of that, I regret tossing the box of items which held the key to my high school relationship. It’s not that I’m longing for that time, or the fact that I miss it, but the memory of it is what’s important to me and I fear that in ten, or twenty years time I won’t remember anymore as bits and pieces have already been lost. Because of that I am finding myself needlessly clinging to items this time around.

Needless to say, in twenty years I may be owning self-storage units across the city as my children move throughout their life stages.

Look, at that. Guess I did have something to say afterall.

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Tagged as: children, life moments, moving, the past