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Memories are a morass to trudge through

Greg Dewar
The Commuter

Monday, February 9, 2009

I finally got the gumption to start cleaning this weekend. It’s been, literally, a year since I cleaned my house. And while I normally don’t do much housework or domestic stuff during school terms because by the time I get home from school AND work AND The Commuter, I’m so dead tired, I just want to watch an hour of TV and then pass out. \
I started to count the beer bottles. And they painted out a history for me. This bottle of Mike’s I’d given to this girl, or that Coors my friend Rob brought over. Black Butte Porter I drank to forget my ex-fiancee. Each one I could place with a date, time, and person and it felt exact, like recreating the last year of my life.
And then I realized, it’s been almost a year since I broke off my engagement with my fiancee who used to live here with me. And it was almost like I’d forgotten. But the more I cleaned the more things of her things I found; a dust-covered leather strap used to tie up her dreadlocks, worn with age, still reeking of sweat from all the concerts we attended; a picture of her, she framed herself and placed above my bedstand, fallen off and actually into the air vent on my subwoofer. It reminded me of my life the past year, that no matter what I do, I’m still diverging around the memories of her.
The worst was a stuffed Ziggy vampire doll that reads “I love you!” in a cartoonish font. She gave that to me the first month we were together, all those long years ago.
And I realized why I don’t clean. It’s not because I’m a messy person, and it’s not because I hate hard work. It’s because I know, every inch of my room is crawling with memories. And I’m so afraid of what I might find. What things in my past I’ve tried so hard to forget or move past that will come cropping back up. Things that I didn’t have the strength to deal with when they were new. Just…things. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized the golden sheen of time had passed over, all of those memories were happy. And these were just things. Things I could keep if I wanted and put on display, or things I could toss because they meant nothing to me anymore. Just…things.
I desperately needed to clean my room, for my head. And while I’m still mid-process, the fact of the matter is, it feels like it’s mine again. It isn’t a layer of pain buried with new trappings and things to cover it up. It’s just like in your head…you can’t just block it out and make it go away.
It was nice to pack up all the memories of my old life in an old hard-drive box and put it on the shelf. The military, my rank insignias, pictures of my brothers in arms, their phone numbers and last known addresses, my lucky bullet, a scrap of paper with no words on it that came off a letter a friend wrote me in Basic. A lock of Sarah’s hair, her Guild Wars account information, the hemp necklace she made me at the Country Fair in 2006. The wedding ring I would’ve given her. The first edition VHS cassette of Star Trek: Voyager’s pilot episode. Well, maybe that will stay next to my Tholian Web snowglobe.

Two different lives that were different from the first one, lumped together and buried, because they no longer bear relevance on this one. Love and War. In the sands of time, all things are relegated to equality and sameness.

I don’t think I’ll ever feel love again, but I’m glad to know I’ll never feel war again.

Eventually…you’re going to have to deal with that pain. I try so hard to be emotionless and unreadable, and it works, because no one is close to me. But maybe I should let go and get back to who I was…before the Military, before Sarah…back to a pristine time when I was proud to care.

You can’t run forever…because you’re always going to carry that weight, Space Cowboy.

Comment

I bet you will feel a whole lot better when you finish cleaning your room. Plus, I really want to meet the old Greg.

— L · Feb 12, 12:28 PM · #

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