Mon 28 Feb 2011
Forgotten lives
Posted by PJ under memories, my poetry, poetry
No Comments
I’ve had a forced clean up campaign going—boxes and boxes of junk out in the garage that have sat there for five years, since I moved into this house. I went from a large one bedroom with a great deal of storage space to two rooms and what space I could steal from the main part of the house. I quickly ran out of storage and those boxes sat there, waiting to be purged, daunting me, mocking me. I don’t have the luxury of letting sleeping dogs lie anymore. We need room for medical supplies.
Some boxes are easy to go through, composed of knickknacks and paddywacks and papers and whatnots. Disposing of the stuff isn’t easy, but as I’m having to do this in a hurry, I’m purging some things and cramming the rest into any available space or on top of already-standing stuff in the house. It’s a horrid mess and will have to be gone through again and purged some more, but…that’s another trauma, somewhere down the line. I’ve got four xerox boxes of books in the back of my car waiting to be donated somewhere. There will be more.
Other boxes aren’t as easy to go through. When my moving date grew closer, I was just shoving things into boxes, mostly paperwork and god-knows, with the thought, “I’ll sort these later.” A pay-me-now-or-pay-me-later situation, and payment has come due. These boxes have to be gone through relatively slowly, sometimes paper by paper, to see which can be safely recycled, which should be kept, and which should be shredded. Often, out of an entire xerox-sized box full of paper, I’ll keep a stack maybe a half-inch high. You know that saying, “You have to write a million words of **** before you begin to write the good stuff”? Apparently, I thought you also had to print it out. Most of that exists on my hard drive so can be recycled (but what a waste of paper!).
Mostly, the sorting is tedious, but sometimes I land upon something that’s been lost for five years, or something that speaks to me from another time, almost another life.  Sometimes I run across things that only exists in longhand, that I’d completely forgotten about. Many are quite cringeworthy, but some are not bad, and even the ideas behind some of the cringey stuff still sparks my imagination. “I could work with this,” I say to myself, and lay these aside for another day’s consideration.
Sometimes, as I said, they almost seem to belong to another life. Like that horrible bout of chronic insomnia I went through for about three months back in the late 90s. It was entirely due to some medication I was taking because once I went off it, I returned to my usual cycle of sleep. I have always been a talented sleeper. It’s a sensual pleasure I revel in, so it was quite a foreign to be up at all hours and unable to nod off. What reminded me of this episode was a piece of notebook paper with a hand-scrawled poem on it. Not a great poem, but a great spark of memory:
Insomnia
Things dropping like things do
through the links in the chains of midnight
held fast but slipping away
by the link of the chains of midnight
drinking hot milk laced with vanilla
as I sit on the edge of my bed
so I can drink my rest
deep, deep, deep—
but only these chains bind me here
long past midnight
I used to sleep like a champion
now it takes so little to chase it
and I howl in my chains
like a dog in the night
cold and so alone, chained
to a stake in the yard
There was an actual dog who lived across the alley and a few doors down from my apartment. Sometimes the two of us would howl in unison, each in our lonely, sleepless vigils. It was odd to think of all that again.
It’s not that I’d forgotten this period in my life, but I really don’t think of it often. It was an aberration, so unlike my usual experience. I do get the occasional bout of sleepless, but not like that. I hope to never have another period like that. It’s a life I’d much rather not relive.
