details of a sunset
Jul. 14th, 2006 02:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
theladyroseI used to write my life out in post-it notes. Nothing was too trivial to document: snippets of conversations, phrases that sounded good in my head, song parodies, extensive film score reviewing notes, silly messages to friends, even the occasional cartoon. I used up nearly an entire pad in recording the dreams of a talking sonnambulist. (Sadly, those records of Cathy have mysteriously disappeared.) I've gone through at least ten pads covering friends' lockers entirely in post-it notes partly as an artistic statement, as a challenge to authority (will the maintenance crew take it down?) and as a way of cheering someone up or at least amusing them and myself. I've discovered too many too count in the top of my desk; as of a few days ago I couldn't open up that desk drawer without five things falling out because there were so many pieces of paper stuffed in there.
It's just like me to measure things out in minute quantities. Perhaps it's my innate emotional parsimony; perhaps it's my unreliable memory; perhaps it's sheer apathy. It's funny-I never really pay too much attention to all of the typical milestones like the start of a new year, getting my driver's licence, graduation, those sorts of things (I didn't even try for parallel structure; deal with it). I guess I just don't find those personal enough. These little scraps, like the proverbial message in a bottle, trap emotion as we'd like to remember them. It's savoring every moment to the point where they almost lose significance because there are so many of them. They offer a false sense of permanence in the past; I cling to them because they allow me to slip back for a moment to revisit my old life. And only now have I begun to realize that my attachment to these little slips of paper, often crumpled and unreadably scrawled, borders on the pathological. I have sometimes suspected that my passion for history stems from this deep-seated need to freeze frame and capture all of the moments I'm so afraid of losing, to have something of worth for which to account my life.
As you can guess, I can't bring myself to take them to the rubbish bin yet.
It's just like me to measure things out in minute quantities. Perhaps it's my innate emotional parsimony; perhaps it's my unreliable memory; perhaps it's sheer apathy. It's funny-I never really pay too much attention to all of the typical milestones like the start of a new year, getting my driver's licence, graduation, those sorts of things (I didn't even try for parallel structure; deal with it). I guess I just don't find those personal enough. These little scraps, like the proverbial message in a bottle, trap emotion as we'd like to remember them. It's savoring every moment to the point where they almost lose significance because there are so many of them. They offer a false sense of permanence in the past; I cling to them because they allow me to slip back for a moment to revisit my old life. And only now have I begun to realize that my attachment to these little slips of paper, often crumpled and unreadably scrawled, borders on the pathological. I have sometimes suspected that my passion for history stems from this deep-seated need to freeze frame and capture all of the moments I'm so afraid of losing, to have something of worth for which to account my life.
As you can guess, I can't bring myself to take them to the rubbish bin yet.
