Like the Deserts Miss the Rain

This morning, I awoke suddenly. The upstairs neighbors were having completely successful sex in the room directly above my bed and I opened my eyes during the energetic butt-slapping, heart-pounding, plaster-peeling, furniture-wrecking, neighbor-waking, pet-perturbing "Who's your daddy?" ten-minute portion of our program. I think.

I had to get up anyway.

Yesterday, Paulie Gonzalez started cleaning out the storage unit and last night, he brought a truckful of my things to the apartment. I had just winnowed the post-move still-boxed stuff heap down to about five boxes but now there's enough Rubbermaid Roughneck Storage Boxes piled in the living room to consider it a questionable remodeling job. There's a whole box of Johnny's letters to me, manuscripts, postcards and playbills. We were prodigious corespondents from the time he went off to college in 1980 until we both got email in the mid-1990s. Another box holds Christmas lights, my motorcycle helmet, my rollerblade pads, helmet and skates. If I ever want a concussion I'm fully equipped to get one. My grandmother's drapes fill two containers, old grant applications and supporting documentation fill two more containers. These things don't bother me; in fact, I missed some of them terribly. I'm not sure how much of this I need anymore but I suspect a ruthless cleaning will see most of the paperwork hurled into the dumpster outside - though not the letters, postcards and manuscripts. They stay.

In 1995 and 1996, I was involved in a huge collaborative art project that ate my life. Don't get me wrong: the work was good, and well worth any sacrifice, in my opinion. In the process though I lost almost everything, then fell into a deep, life-threatening depression, during which medication wiped my memory clean. It is a miracle I survived - or not. I was actively trying to kill myself so we know I'm crappy at it. Anyway, everything about my life came to a point at an arts festival in September, 1996. Five crates of props, scripts and crafts projects from that festival sit in my living room now. I should demand someone remove the cheese grater jabbed in my lungs. I would rather chew off my own feet than try staging that art project again but throwing away the props...I don't know if I could do it.

The crate that really hurts, in an "it hurts but throwing it away would kill me" way, is the one filled with my journals. This morning, I bit my lip and cracked the lid. A few composition notebooks from high school, journals from the years after I came back from Hartford with a baby I didn't know how to care for, from when I was married - all this covering 1977 to 1990 - these form less than half the notebooks. The majority are filled with the crazy years devoted to art and madness: 1991-1998, I think. I opened a few of them. I sound the same to me as I did at fourteen, nineteen and twenty-eight. God! I am one of those Slow Children. Where's my sign?

A lot of my life is missing from my memory. Like the Reynolds Wrap ladies say: this leads to easy clean up. What is this tacky thing? I don't know? Out it goes! But the journals are problematic. On some pages, I see a girl who needs a good spanking; on others, a woman who needs a good whack with a mallet. Oh look! I fall in hot, sweaty, stupefying love with a psychopath! Now, a fine-smelling man who can only have athletic sex with me in public parks! Oh snap, the brilliant, bipolar art student I love falls for a dance student and brings her to our house so I go to a Fourth of July party and meet a married mad scientist, who pursues, woos and wins me, and when his wife finds out -

That's enough of that. I clap the lid back on the crate. I miss being Me terribly, but there's only so much Me I can stand.