Trunk

Feeling the dust cling to my fingers. Making sure I don’t slip as I maneuver the heavy box. Papers, letters, photos, thoughts, dreams, mysteries still unsolved. Sometimes it’s good to take a look at your past. Like stepping on the scale. A way to measure, to see, to gain perspective on something you’d been unable to grasp before that.

The lid sticks and then gives. A gentle tug and then the creak that let me know that yes, it really has been that long. A walk down memory lane like this deserves a drink. I pull a few items from the trunk and set them beside my laptop. I make my drink and I set up my camera. Back when I packed this box, I would never have imagined that I’d be sifting through the contents with an audience watching a thousand miles away.

Oh how life has changed and the smile that comes with that realization.

There was so much raw brilliance left behind in those first scribbles There was so much passion, unchanneled and often misunderstood. There was laughter and pain and drama.. oh my lord.. was there drama. But in the end, twenty years later, most of the memories were fond.

It’s amazing to me what I saved and how I saved it. Maybe it’s just in my personality or maybe it’s because of what I lost so young. Or maybe it’s because I was in charge of the last 4 moves we made. Not to mention the deconstruction of 3 different households. The packing, the lifting, the moving, the sorting, the storing. It gives you a perspective on what’s important. All that is important to me before I was married is in that box.

I have college papers in there too. It’s amazing what strikes a chord in your heart. The Life and Death of Little Italy, albeit badly titled, represented an enormous body of research into my family, the church and the community they came from. The Existence of God according to Thomas Aquainis. I miss being that possessed by a passion. Well, other than a passion that gets crabby at 7:45 on the dot.

There are so many tiny tidbits that I kept that nobody else would have, but they didn’t take up much room and they were oh so important to me. And by the energy I felt when I pulled them out of the box and recognized them, they still are important to me.

Giggling on camera, reading aloud pages of the school newspaper for someone elses benefit as much as my own. It felt like I was 16 again. It’s hard to describe the kind of magic you feel when you step back in time. The look in someone’s eye. The way they feel about the world. The way they felt. The journey between those two points.

I’m constantly grappling to understand, but the artist in me knows that sometimes you simply have to feel to create. To look for inspiration, no matter how off the beaten path the search takes you. And I’ve still got Dead Poets Society ringing in my ears. O Captain My Captain. And all the hope and future that once shone in my eyes, that still can be found, gently glowing, on the right days.