Tuesday, October 11, 2011

treasure box

Yesterday, I was folding laundry in the living room, when I heard a crash. I went into the garage, and saw nothing out of the ordinary except for a lone bottle of water toppled onto the floor.
I went back inside. Three minutes later: CRASH! BAM! POW!

I ran into the garage this time, and definitely saw the source of the noise: three storage boxes on their sides, contents partially spilled.

What had tipped them over?

We'd balanced some other bottles of water on the boxes, and one of them had gotten punctured somehow. Half of its contents had leaked out....soaking the top of a cardboard box that's filled with Dyami's and my old papers (school essays we liked, precious letters from friends, diaries). This you probably Would Not Want to Get Wet.

I decided cleaning up the spill took precedence over the laundry.

What might have been a horrible tale of ruined treasures, however, is actually a tale of rediscovered treasures. Only a few things were water-logged beyond repair. I'm lucky I heard everything falling over. The stuff that was most precious to me (namely, a bunch of my letters from college, notebooks I filled while I was studying abroad, etc), were fine.

And so I looked through a bunch of old memories for part of an hour, and marvelled. Because back in the day, I kept me some diaries. Some of them (when I lived in Argentina), I kept in blank-sheeted drawing notebooks, which makes them all the more compelling: space for calligraphy, and drawings, and just jam-packed text. The text isn't super-exciting (though I did find diaries from when Dyami and I started dating, and my entry for September 11th), but the sheer amount of WORDs is quite astonishing.

I left thinking that maybe I needed to start a diary again. Something that feels artistic in my hand, and that I make into more of an art work, a daily practice of working with my hands.

It might mean that I post less here, because the sheer physicality of the memories really charmed me.

I'll keep you posted.

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