If You Ask, That’s What I’ll Say
Everybody tells me I should read this, watch that, do this, distract myself, engage others, take things in, fill up the space, but the truth is, I want to do the opposite—I want to pour, pour out words and thoughts and feelings, empty myself of this thick, sticky, viscous fluid sloshing inside me, memories that I no longer know what to do with, feelings I wasn’t ready to put away, all that I wanted to save and admire later but now have to discard.
It is difficult to be abstract or indirect here. I am at a loss as to what to do with all this, this mental stuff that I’ve accumulated, some of which I’ve grown to love, some of which I’m embarrassed to have, and some of which I’ve tried to throw away already but couldn’t find the heart to do so.
I’m an emotional packrat. I take and file things away for later contemplation, sometimes years down the line. This is where my photographic urges come from: they let me hoard and catalog experience and take in more than I would without assistance and help serve as an external repository for memories that I can recall later and process at a more relaxed pace.
They are, as all memories are, valuable to me, but these—these are particularly problematic in that I had at one point hoped that they would be the makings of a more interesting story than the brief, abortive one that actually occurred. If getting over things involves breaking and throwing things away, this will be doubly difficult: not only do I find the idea of discarding anything difficult, normally, but I find this set of memories particularly excruciating to process because I wanted to keep these, these were ones I wanted to save and smile about later down the line. Now, they’re reminders of opportunities missed and potential lost and all the things that went wrong, mixed in with of all the ways I thought things were great and all the hopes I had built on top of those thoughts.
And in many ways, that’s the worst part of it—the death of my ideas, my hopes and desires and all the things I normally don’t let myself feel, that’s what I’m sad about, more so than anything else: that if only for a moment, I genuinely believed that I had—we had—the possibility for something profound and wonderful and good.