What is the one tangible item in the entire world you would protect at all costs?
If my house were burning down, my first thought is that I would like to grab as many important things as I could get my hands on. I don’t deny being a somewhat materialistic person: put very simply, I like my stuff. The artwork on the walls, most that I made myself, one an authentic hand-painted tapestry from India, given to me by my grandmother, a few pieces traded from other artist friends; my grandfather’s ashes; my file book containing my taxes and other important documents; a hand-painted Oaxacan wood carving that I bought in college; the collection of letters I’ve kept from friends and family members over the years. But which object would I choose, which object would I protect? If I had to choose only one, the choice becomes very difficult. I skim over the objects around me and to every one, I think, “Not important enough,” or “Replaceable,” or “I could live without it.” To be perfectly honest I think it would be feasible for me to live without all of these objects I hold so dear.
But I must choose, and since that is the case I will settle on my book of writings. I don’t call this a journal, no. Not a diary. I actually don’t touch the thing all that often, really. But every important thing (some unimportant) that’s happened to me in the past four years is somehow recorded in that book. The poem I memorized at my grandfather’s funeral, a few quotes from a huge fight between my dad and my brother before he went off to college, a string of related dreams I had for a few weeks at a time once, a portion of a song that struck me as important on a given day, a letter I wrote to myself reminding me why not to ever consider getting back together with my ex-boyfriend, word-vomit drafts from when I was so sick with worry about my boyfriend’s drug addiction.
This book is the proof of how I have become the person that I am today, and I think if I needed to have something to hold on to from my years living in Arizona, I would need that book. It’s the one thing that if I lost, I would look back years later and wish I still had that book. Because it holds pieces of myself that I would never be able to get back.
I have always had an excellent memory for things like names, faces, voices and music. But I’ve noticed that I have a lot of trouble remembering moments in my life with any real clarity. I can never remember exactly how a conversation went, or what events transpired in what order on what day. Heck, when my grandfather passed away, I couldn’t even remember a single full conversation I had had with him. Wracked my brain for days and I couldn’t come up with anything – just feelings, fragmented images and the sound of his voice. I would forget most of what’s happened to me in my life if it weren’t for the act of writing it down.
So the book is it. I would protect my memories, my words, the evidence of my life.
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