Hold Please
I am a packrat, a hoarder, a sentimental and hopeless romantic. I hate change, I find comfort in what I know, and I'm paranoid that one day everything I have could be taken away from me. I hang, I cling, I glom on to things, times, people, words. Do you and I email? I've probably saved your messages. Do we IM? Yes, even those. Letters, birthday cards, voice mails, all of it. If I could catch that look in your eyes in a net, I'd put it in a jar on my nightstand and wake up every hour to behold it.
Why do I get so attached? Why the paralysis about letting things go? One, because a lot of these things, times, people, words are wonderful and worth keeping close. Two, because they are a record of a moment, and enough moments collected can reconstruct a lifetime or something close to it, and that's something akin to immortality, at least if you don't think about it too much. Three, because if I don't remember them, keep them, write them down, who will? There are only a handful of people I trust with my memories the way I trust myself. This explains at least partly why I blog. And why my blog is detail after detail after detail about things that seem insignificant and matter only to me.
Today while talking with a very good friend whose words and looks and very person I want to hold onto more than anyone else's, I realized something that makes my "enjoy it now because one day it'll all be gone" paranoia subside significantly. See, I?m wrong to think that one day there will be an end to it. I mean, of course one day there will be an end, like a dead end, but that?s not what we?re talking about here. What we?re talking about is that the good times I have with friends, the things that come over email and IM and the phone and in person, well, those things are infinite. There will always be more to say, always something else to do, always another adventure around the corner, always another song in the queue. And in that there is calm.
Ctrl+S.
This post got me thinking, because in my physical surroundings I am the complete opposite of a packrat. I have a mother who obsessively collects STUFF, so from childhood on I've had a very adverse reaction to having a lot of crap around. I obsessively divest myself of material possessions on a regular basis. But reading this, I realized that I do collect email (and I'm even a bit of a packrat on that front since I have way too many email accounts). And I don't even know why I'm keeping most of those emails, because most consist primarily of just polite back's and forth's. I could easily delete the majority of it. But I just realized that I might be keeping some of it out of politeness...for fear the Politeness Police might bust in someday and ask if I've kept that one-word response email from John Doe back in 2000. Hmmm, might be time for some email cleanup...
I really enjoyed your post. I'm the same way and I've often wondered why I am so obsessed with preserving moments, too. I know that in case of fire, the first things I would grab, besides my cat, are my journals and my photo albums. Everything else can be replaced except for those memories.