Keepsakes

I’m a person who holds onto things. Papers from high school, journals, loose paper, outdated clothing, scraps of fabric—I am absolutely sure that all objects in the world will, at some point, become useful in the face of a particular situation. A textbook about the cultural differences in the importance of hair? Surely I will need that one day. That hilarious cotton hunter green onesie? Let’s tuck it away in a drawer, just in case. Will someone ever ask for any writing I’ve done on the possible paranoid schizophrenic tendencies of Shakespeare’s Richard III? Yes! Maybe!

But it’s more than that. Lately, I’ve realized—I’m sure I always knew it, but not consciously—that I solidify emotions and fleeting feelings into things that I can toss on my back and lug around. I meet an interesting man and he seems to be interested in me, and I think, Oh, this is something that’s happening. The next day, when it seems cooler than it was before, I feel thrown and delusional. That must not have happened yesterday, I think, or I must have made that up. It can’t be that it’s changed, it has to be that it was never there.

I don’t know why my faith in reality is so strong, or why I need it to be so strong. Wouldn’t it be more comforting to grapple with the “fact” that things do change, be they feelings or appearances or hopes or desires, and maybe one day learn to love that change, or at the very least realize it? Realize it. Make it real. Make the change a part of reality. Why do I take impressions that come to me in a moment and harden them, fossilize an idea I know is mostly born out of my own inner life and imagination and toss the amber remnants into a pile labelled “Times I Once Felt Something?” Because that’s what attraction is, after all, isn’t it? That interior jolt that kickstarts our FutureBrain into thinking, I could spend time with you one day and this is what it would be like, and in actuality, the initial reaction has so little to do with what the separate person, the Other, is thinking or feeling and all to do with what I, the Dreamer, have woven.

Dealing with objects is reality. There is a table at which I am sitting and it is really there, so I put my laptop on it. There is a book that I want to read, so I buy it and put it in my bag. If I go back tomorrow and the book isn’t there, what can it mean? By laws of physics and reality, the book cannot have changed into air particles overnight and magically disappeared from my bag. My brain must be at fault here, must have fabricated a whole episode wherein I purchased a book and put it in my bag. But feelings? Those are real but not fixed, present but not constant, viscous and not solid, and always at the mercy of someone else’s contribution. It is fine to harden my own feelings and tuck them away neatly in a drawer, but it is only fine to do that if I never want to live outside myself. If I want to be in love with an imaginary man, I am at liberty to do so. If I want to be in love with another person, I have to mix my liquid persona with someone else’s, and that, by nature, requires a give and take of “reality,” mine for his or hers, mine for Ours, mine for mine after meeting this someone.

I admit I am envious of anyone who can “go with the flow,” if anyone out there truly can. I’m particularly bad at that. I cannot help but be horribly and confoundedly thrown when someone else’s flow shifts my own, but this is what it is to live with other humans: mix, shift, give, take, change, rest, repeat. I don’t want to love a table, a book; maybe I better stop acting like it.