Years Gone By and Still

December 13th, 2009

Brought a huge pile of old crap home from my parents’ house yesterday. My Mom is sure that it’s my old papers that are cluttering up her basement, and I am going to let her maintain that delusion. Anyway, since I didn’t ever manage to leave the house today… (vodka = bad, apparently. At least +vodka -dinner = bad.) I thought going through some of this old stuff might be a good brainless thing to do while I munched veggie pizza and watched Chronicles of Riddick for the 179th time.

Tons of things I’d forgotten about in this first pile. Creative writing from high school and early college – typed on a typewriter even. Old pictures, cards, journals and artwork. Very interesting to read in the voice of my 20-year old self, especially. So many of the things I struggled with back then (in terms of the ways I relate to the world) are still things I struggle with today. It seems my view of them was much clearer back then, now it’s all covered in grimy layers of nuance and experience. Back then I was much more blunt, especially with myself.

Yeah, my hair pretty much looked the same back then. And yes, I still wear that exact style of shoe.

My favorite thing I’ve found so far was this little book that my first really serious boyfriend made for me. He was an amazing guy in a lot of ways, and reading his old letters lets me put a rosier glow on the relationship than it perhaps deserves. See, he was just the type that my stupid broken brain still picks out for me today—artistic, talented, emotionally needy and super-controlling. Such a delightful combo of traits! So that was not going to work out, of course. But there were good parts, like in any relationship, and looking through this makes me remember his insane sense of humor and how he always made me laugh. I actually think that he hated everything even more than I did, and that’s an impressive feat indeed. Looking back, I think part of my attraction to him was being the one thing he loved in the world. Or at least the one thing he didn’t despise. Being the center of that kind of attention was compelling, and the two of us together were an amazing asshole misanthropic duo.

When we couldn’t be together he was always making me things, sending me stuff like this. (Part of our relationship was long-distance, when we were both in college, so we did a lot of mailing.) I think I am part of the last generation to ever carry out love-affairs via postal mail. That’s sad. You can’t sketch crazy characters in the margin of an email. The feeling of getting a new mixtape in the mail from someone you weren’t going to see for two months carried an emotional intensity that you can’t really match in a world with on-demand video chat. We could only talk on the phone twice a week because long distance was so expensive. And I had to trade off phone time with my roommate, because of course we shared the same phone in our apartment and he wanted to be using it to talk to HIS girlfriend. No cell phones with text messaging and free long distance. I had to make lists of things that I wanted to remember to tell him when I talked to him. No instant messaging! No email! Having to go buy stamps at the post office! Writing so much that your letter was over the limit and having to add more stamps! It was insanity, I tell you! OK now I sound like someone’s grandmother, so I am going to stop there before I take to walloping people with my cane.

Anyway, here’s part of one of the little books he put together for me. Seeing it made me smile.

Music : Tracy Chapman - Baby Can I Hold You

Filed under: dating drama, personal ramblings | Comments (2)

2 Responses to “Years Gone By and Still”

Dim Reaper on December 14, 2009 1:00 am
I sometimes wonder whether when we look back in our everyday memories we don’t just make the bad times seem not as bad, but also make the good times seem not as good. Maybe human memory has an “averaging” function with time.

This is why it is good to look at old pictures, read old letters, diaries, watch old home videos. I think that to get yourself out of a relationship and survive it you have to water down the good traits of an ex. It is good to come back many years later and remember the good things that you did together and the silly in-jokes that you shared.
SuperBadGirl on December 14, 2009 9:36 am
I like the idea of the memory averaging function, makes sense to me that our brains would work that way. With this much time behind me it’s easier to remember the good stuff and see him as a more innocuous character – someone with his own challenges to face instead of just someone who fucked with my head for kicks. I do remember how much fun we had – especially at first – our group of friends hanging out laughing until we cried at every dumb thing we came up with to do. That was a really fun period in my life.

But in reading what I was writing about him and our relationship at the time I also just really want to take myself aside and say “Oh honey – really? Are you serious here?” What’s funny is that hearing it in my own voice makes it clear to me that I knew at the time I was making questionable choices, I saw pretty clearly some of his more harmful traits. I want to ascribe some level of youthful ignorance to myself, but even back then I totally knew better than to do what I was doing, and did it anyway. (Well, maybe *that’s* the youthful ignorance part, the doing it anyway part.)