nowhere to run nowhere to hide

So my mom has decided to clean out the attic. What this means for me is that every time I go over to my parents' house to do laundry and eat their food, I get a box of my old stuff to go through. We'll decide what to throw out and what to keep and judging by the three boxes I sifted through last week, the choices pretty much make themselves.

Some of the things I threw away: torn up leather sandals from 1992, 19-year-old papaya-scented hairspray, a city No Parking sign that I hung in my bedroom in an attempt to feel like a bad ass, and photo solution only one or two decades past its expiration date.

Some of the things I found and kept! CISV village t-shirts circa 1986 from the other kids' countries at my camp in Newcastle, England. This week I've sported my old sweatshirt from Iceland and shirts from Korea and Norway. The fact that I can still wear a shirt I wore in 1986 says much more about how freakishly fast I grew as a kid and how flat-chested I have remained as an adult than anything else.

Also of great joy and fear in equal parts is the big, big box of letters that I received, and much more painfully, sent over the years. At some point after high school and before we lost touch, Andrea sent me all the letters I'd written her since ninth grade. I've read a couple and they make me want to put my head under a pillow and scream. And weep. And then scream some more.



I remember so well what it felt like to be me and it wasn't often comfortable. I was kind of awesome but I also sucked. I would never, for any price, go back to that time. I was mature in some ways and stunted in others, I meant well and had a big heart but oh, I was a shithead. I wanted to be bad, much worse than I ever was, I wanted to get in trouble, but I was too shy to make much happen.

And I wrote about it all A LOT. In the letters, my long drawn out explanations and insecurities are punctuated with unintentional hilarity but there is only so much I can take at once. Ever since the first night the box came home and I shuffled through the overflowing envelopes, howling and shrieking, I have glanced at it sideways and then quickly made myself busy. Example: my cuticles look GREAT today.

Much easier on my self-image are the letters from others, my favorites so far being from my cousins Mary Beth and Lauren. Holy. Crap. From when I was 12-17 years old and they were respectively 9-14 and 7-12, we wrote letters that have PROJECT written all over them. I don't know what art I'm going to make out of these but something must be done. I must atone for losing the VHS movies we shot, the dramas and thrillers and talk shows.