10 November 2000 ~ Throwing it all away...

I've been working my way through my current apartment, throwing things away. Have been drinking starbucks-and-bailey's to counteract the drama of all of this... My tummy's going to hurt in the morning...

As we all know, Helena is a MAD packrat. Helena has things in her apartment that she's absolutely never going to need again. Things such as old checkbooks from Santa Fe. Things such as plastic poker chips, even though Helena doesn't own a deck of cards. Things such as a tube of Johnson's Baby Soothing Vapor Cream; dull razors; a large handful of perfume-samples that smell like ass; an ad for "Evita," a ridiculous number of crucifixes, and I DON'T know why; temporary tattoos advertising the Endicott Police Department (I'm absolutely not kidding); numerous little dishes stolen from Friendly's, which I've never had occasion to use; dozens of little wicker baskets full of nail polish accessories, even though I chew my nails off; about five thousand boxes of Q-tips; enough tampons to satisfy the entire Isle of Lesbos for 6 years; trashy earrings I have never worn; about sixty-million dishes of gross candy that nobody in their right mind would eat... Helena saves things such as those little plastic things that hospitals give you pills in... Things such as wine corks and bottle caps... Things such as half a dozen old baja jackets that I've never worn... Things such as props from theater-stuff, some of which I was never even in... Concert programs from concerts I didn't like. Empty bottles of aspirin. A tiny little sponge shaped like a buffalo. About a million pens, half of which don't work...

Christmas presents I never sent: the mug I bought for David at the Coyote Café in Santa Fe; the giant lollipop I bought for Mike because we had a joke about phallic-looking lollipops; the silver thimbles I bought my grandmother and forgot to give her; the paper accordian I've been meaning to send Tommy for over a year...

Little boxes of rocks... A piece of red brick...

Spoons, none of which match each other... I don't know where I got half of them. A big transparent brown bowl of my mom's. I don't know why it's at my house.

I've been throwing things away. Old emails that have no relevence to my life anymore. Photos I've chopped out of magazines and never glued onto anything. My Santa Fe checkbooks.

When I moved here, I took everything with me that I had ever possessed. I didn't want my father to have any of it. I'm sure he would have thrown most of it away, but even throwing it away myself was preferable to giving him the satisfaction of discarding my possessions as he discarded me. I clung to these things. My collections of trash. I used to pick up random little things along the sides of the road, and I used to keep them: toys, coins for laundromats, broken jewelry... I kept them because I had nothing. I had no home. I had noplace to call my own, as the saying goes. I had my collections of trash, and those were the only things connecting me to my history, to myself.

How will I ever be able to prove my life ever existed?

...I've been proving myself to myself by saving every tangible article that passes into my hands. I was there... I touched this... I found this the night I listened to the Soft Seventies On Sunday on my way home from work... I bought this in a shop in Bar Harbor, in Boston, in Omaha, in Tulsa... This is the soda bottle from the bus station in Amarillo... This is the spoon I found lying on the ground on the Fourth of July... This is the receipt from when I bought my tickets to England... This is the newspaper I read in Syracuse... The notebook I wrote in in El Paso... The flowers I pressed from my old backyard... The tea container I kept because I liked the picture... This is the lighter I bought in Albuquerque... This is my bus ticket... This is my plane ticket... This is a piece of jewelry my mom gave me because it's too ugly for her to wear... This is a scrap of fabric from my "Wizard of Oz" costume... The brochure I absently picked up in Asheville about preserving historic buildings. This is the picture of Erich that Jayden drew and accidentally left where he could find it... This is the salad dressing pitcher Neil stole for me in Ithaca... This is the candle Susan gave me on my birthday... THIS IS MY LIFE... I WAS THERE...

I have to throw out some of this shit. Yes, I was there. But I have been clinging too tightly to objects with no meaning -- no meaning other than reassurance that I've been places and made some impression on them.

It's stopped mattering so much to me. I don't want to rid myself of my past, but I want it to fade, and I want to let it go. I want to leave room for new things to happen, and for new dorky collections of crap.

"I watch the world go round and round... I see mine turning upside down... You're throwing it all away..." --Genesis.

I threw away an old postcard Jeff sent me. I threw away most of the magazine clippings, even the "Evita" ad. Joyfully, I flushed the very last of my birth control pills, and I waved goodbye to them and chuckled.

Are you keeping ANYTHING, Helena?

Maybe a few things... My notebooks, my stationary, the little white teapot I stole from Java's three and a half years ago... The grotesquely obsessive David Lynch collection... The postcards from Tommy. Meg's Mardi Gras beads. The stuffed cow Jayden gave me for my birthday when I turned 15. The Jones Soda label glued to the Myrtle Beach postcard. The little silver bank I've had since I was a baby.

I was there.

But there are other places I'd like to go to. Unburdened.

Love,
~Helena*