Downstairs there is this massive plastic bin that contains everything I saved from childhood. It's been there for almost six months, ever since last fall. Only lately have I begun to go through it. It's definitely overwhelming... and adorable... and disturbing all at once.
I saved bloody everything. Going through it is like walking down an overgrown path; I never know what is going to be around the next corner, waiting to poke me in the eye. There are old dress patterns for my wedding dress, for goodness sake.
There are lots of random pictures with charcoal, pencil, pen, watercolor. Each one is a world of its own, a whole, tightly enclosed emotional world that I had forgotten completely about, but springs to life for me as soon as I see it. Loneliness. Despair. Hope. Sexuality (very hidden, of course, usually symbolic).
Then there are poems from the fourth grade, such as:
The Unicorn
In a meadow far away
Stood a unicorn in fading day
As black as midnight
As he stood ready to fight
He is as strong as steel
And to humans He'll never neal
So he lives far away
Seen only in the fading day.
About the Author
I live in --------,
Like Poems, Unicorns, Dragons, stars, comments and any thing that is either mithical or mysterious.
I have four brothers no sisters.
I am also a Christian.
I am also a bad speller (If you all ready have not noticed!)
The End!
How adorable was I? I got a 90 on that project, by the way. Also, I just have to point out that I don't have four brothers, that's the number of siblings total. I was never very good with math.
Then there are god awful entries that I can hardly bear to read through from my early teens. I can hardly bear my own religiosity. It makes me physically cringe. But it was all I knew, I had no other way of framing the world.
The worst part is, I had no idea that mistakes are the most valuable part of our human experience. So mistakes, even small ones, were cataclysmic. Also, I had no idea that life flows along like a winding river, sometimes it curls around back and sometimes it spreads out, slow and deep and sometimes it runs forward double quick. One has a general idea of where one is going, but no idea of the actual path, what places one will pass through on the way.
I thought everything had to be straight as stone, so I was ashamed of my own contradictions. What a burden it is to be young! Poor me; everything to figure out and thinking I had no time to do it and no room for error.
How about this poem....?
here I am all lost in snow of winter's dark
all alone
sweet mary all alone.
I say not when nor how my sweet my own
my dear beloved one
Swing high or low
Swing sweet this all the night
never matter how or when
never matter where
But this the never ending truth
But this to keep me up at night
But this to cry my inward eye
But this to send my soul aleaping
alight a fire and joy,
But this to keep me up at night
-March, 1999
Also, I unearthed these two old buddies of mine:
Also these guys, all carefully wrapped in their own little boxes:
I'm thinking I might take bits and pieces, snips of this and that and put it together in a scrapbook. I think I have an old, blank one some where around here. We'll see.
