Artifacts

Although I had several times stripped childhood bedroom of no-longer-needed possessions, when I desperately moved back to my parents' house I found old stuff everywhere. Wedged in the backs of drawers, notebooks with a few pages of writing, playbills, ticket stubs, a box of toys, old things of mine that mother had found elsewhere in the house and shoved in the closet. The debris of my adolescent life was the foundation for boxes of the adult life I'd just lost. I felt as though I were living in an archeological site. These were no longer my possessions but the artifacts a life and that life no longer belonged to me. Rather, I was sharing space with artifacts of me.

This blog is, in many ways, about the past. And about how the present becomes the past, the past lives on in the present and the threads that run through them, connecting them.  

It is also about how physical objects reflect one's relationship to the world. In many ways possessions are the physical evidence of a life, and they mark and measure the stages of a life and its changes.  

Perhaps I am stuck in the past and weighted by physicality. Perhaps I need to move on. Perhaps this is my way of doing that, albeit many years too late.   

As time passes I become more ill, finding year to year, that more of my possessions become artifacts. I set something down and realize months later I have been too ill to use it. Dust measures the distance between me and a time I was well enough. I try to be hopeful. Things go into boxes, archived, awaiting a remission. They yield space to ever-growing medical devices and medications. And I am living in the museum of my past selves.