We Meet Again

I don't know what you'd call it. Nostalgia I guess?

It might be the unpacking, the sifting through of items that have followed me from home to home. From Santa Cruz, to college in Davis, to Spain, back to Santa Cruz, to Boulder, back to Santa Cruz, to Cuba, back to Santa Cruz, back to Boulder, to Missoula. I've mentioned before I'm not a saver so there aren't that many things or photos that have made it through all of those puddle jumps. But some have. So it might be that.

I just have been missing. That may not be a feeling, certainly not on the NVC list and it wasn't intended to be on the Feeleez poster (although since there are no labels one can find anything in those colorful characters), but that's what I have been feeling.

I don't want to go backward in time and be the person I am in the photo above, or any previous photo of myself, but I somehow want that me. I want the other people in the photos too. So badly. I miss them. I can remember it all and not really remember at the same time. I unearthed a couple of photo albums and I was so grateful for some of the mundane shots, the ones of the front of rental houses we lived in, or a random shot of a bedroom wall - including some of the even older photos and love drawings I had pinned up. Scenes I thought I had completely forgotten only to find them hiding in my body, memories stored on a cellular level.

There certainly is nothing to do with these feelings. Or any feelings I guess. Feelings don't belong in the realm of "doing".

But this unpacking and remembering and missing in some ways is like re-drawing my own portrait. For the last year we have been living an upscale camping life. There was no tent, a beautiful studio apartment instead. And no dirt really, aside from pet hair and waffle crumbs, but it was like camping in the sense that we brought only clothes, cooking and eating utensils, and toothbrushes. The rest of our worldly and sentimental belongings were stuffed into a storage unit and forgotten for an entire year. I thought it was utterly liberating to be freed from the clutter of our lives, to live with bare walls and just the bare essentials. My spirit was light as a feather and completely happy in that rooftop perch.

Without physical representation of who we were as individuals or as a family we were like anonymous pilgrims in the New World. But perhaps even more so because we had no family heirlooms banging around on our covered wagon. It was almost like we could have changed our names and no one would know. Maybe we were more like spring break vacationers, or tourists in Vegas, no identity except the one we decided to conjure up over cocktails.

And that was fine, definitely fun in the clutter-free sense. So I have been surprised, by the unpacking of objects and the fact that I haven't been interested in packing them right back up again. Don't get me wrong, I make daily campaigns, dangling an object over the Goodwill box and using all of my charming wiles to get the girls and Nathan to agree with discarding things. I do this a lot. But I am surprised that I am not doing it with more things. Instead I unveil an object from our past, one that sat on the stereo shelf of our past life for what felt like three hundred years gathering dust and weighing on my claustrophobic soul with it's objectness, and... I want it.

Each item, each photo reminds me of who we are. Who I am. Who I was and what that means for today. Leafing through the photo album I see, scattered here and there, shots of me holding cats. My cat growing up, a boyfriend's giant fluffy cat, a roommate's old cat, a random stray cat in Spain, our current cat as a baby. And it's not like I don't know already that I like animals but when I see those photos I can't help but say to myself, feel to myself: I'm like that. That's what I'm like.

I am noticing that I like being known by myself, that I even don't mind other people knowing who I truly am (you'd think I knew this already after revealing my naked self on this blog for over a year). I am intrigued to find that although it's a clutter-free lifestyle, I don't want to be a Vegas tourist, stripped of my history and free to re-create it over cocktails. I like it that our house is filling out with our bird figurines.

But with each object, rendered precious by its absence from our recent daily life, I remember. I remember those days when Xi was an infant and I carried her everywhere. Those days when Nathan and four-year old Bella were just moving into this house. Those days when I lived with Shanti in Boulder, had short hair, and had no idea what I was going to do when I "grew up". Those days when I lived with Emily and Jeff in a garage, a room where you could lift the big door open, exposing the bedroom to the alley and a giant field of chamomile. I remember those days and... I want them.

I don't want to go back in time and start from there, but I'd sure like to visit. I wouldn't mind squeezing Echo's infant thighs again, kissing our old German Shepherd, looking closely at that boyfriend again, feeling the normalcy of all of those grainy distant moments.

I sure wouldn't mind that.

But I can't. Not even a phone call to my beloveds or a slower pouring over the photos can do it. I am here and that time is there and there is nothing for it. I can feel the threads, tied to my insides, sewing me into those places, linking me to those people, but I can not tightrope them backward. So I miss. I walk through the house, seeing myself more truly, remembering who I am more clearly, and missing.