For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a bit of a hoarder. Some of my earliest memories are the feeling of running my fingers through the dusty soil of my front yard in the hot July sun to pick out the most vibrantly colored rocks, those that glint in the rays blanketing my warm shadow, dirt speckled hands shuffling through the collection on my bedroom floor as my grandfather hunched over The Illustrated Guide to Rocks & Minerals beside me, exclaiming with undue confidence that the dull blue pebbles—of which we had many—looked to be jade and goddamnit we’re rich!
Later, it was quotes. Sometimes meaningful: questions and answers that spoke to something unsaid inside me. Sometimes, however, they were simply words; pretty, inane little words that twisted my tongue in ways that felt intoxicating and alive, as if they were fighting their way out of my mouth to be screamed with a bite of spit, the way you would scream in someone’s face if they made you so mad your tongue took over and decided that a part of you must come out with the words and stick to the listener in order to get your unequivocal meaning across.
It didn’t stop at rocks or quotes, migrating from plushes to crystals to books to souvenirs to photos and continuing on to this day. And it wasn’t that everything meant something, but I also wasn’t collecting for no reason. It was the cumulation of it all—the photo of my family and I on the ferry port off the Harlem, right before the perfect one, where you can see the attempts to corral, the funny faces, the annoyance; the hummingbird snowglobe with a heavy white ceramic base and rust colored water that I stole from my family’s charity yard sale because it played “Fur Elise,” the only song I knew on the piano (my mother taught me, long graceful fingers settling pudgy ones on ivory keys, pressing down together with each note); the “ABOLISH ICE” pamphlet, one of the many shoved into our hands by protestors on Ellis Island July 4th, 2018, later that day those pamphlets peaked out of our bags to watch my grandmothers twenty year old CRT TV as a picture my brother took appeared on CNN and Patricia Okoumou climbed the Statue of Liberty. The fact that each could point to a specific memory, and therefore event, relationship, interest, emotion–it was these immaterial essences I was looking for, these I would hungrily pull from my life and tack on the walls as if by surrounding myself with things I knew were “me” I could absorb them. Every few weeks, I looked through each item and picture methodically, recalling the time they’re from, listing them out loud in an attempt to memorize things I already knew, tongue relishing in their sweet taste, the texture, the feel as they are embraced by my throat and gut and, for a moment, I felt a little less hollow.
I’ve recently learned something I probably should’ve been taught in my high school psych class instead of watching Silence of the Lambs. Mood-congruent memory: the tendency for the mind to recall experiences consistent with the individual’s current mood. I had some vague idea of this, and how it’s exacerbated in circumstances of mental distress, but it didn’t really click at the time. It makes sense, now, how hard it was to think about anything besides the pit in my stomach for all those years. It makes sense, the things that made me think I was going crazy, the way I believed I lost the ability to love, to be happy, even to be angry. The way I would think about anything that used to make me smile, my family, my friends, my hobbies, my art, and, before I could scrape the barest bit of joy out of them, they’d become mangled in my hands. Maybe I was holding on too tight.
I have a list from that time, somewhere. I don’t know where it is, or what I even wrote it on in the first place—whether shaky fingers fumbled over a phone screen keyboard or wrapped, bruisingly tight, around the hard plastic of a mechanical pencil. But I remember what was on it.
- The smell after rain
- Strato cumulus clouds and the sun beams that shine through them
- The smell of my moms cooking—usually pasta, always garlicky—drifting up the stairs and through the crack beneath my bedroom door
- The shimmering refractions of sunlight on the surface of water as viewed from underneath
- The sound of an F7 chord on acoustic guitar
- The flowers that bloom in November
It’s strange the things you can make into tethers when gravity begins to pull you into the earth. Or, maybe it makes perfect sense. These little things, the lightness of them, like helium balancing out my heavy weight. Things my subconscious couldn’t sabotage, things that dumbfounded even the deep sense of wrongness that pervaded my very presence.
I know I can be shallow. I know that this thinking is a symptom of the sickness that has haunted me for years. And yet, I’ll defend an appreciation for surface level beauty as something to enjoy, to relish in, rather than dismiss in the efforts to find some deeper meaning which might not even exist. I’ve been dissuaded from fate, from god—how can I rely on something that has already proven so fickle? But there will always be something pretty, the way even tears glitter in moonlight, the way a plentiful forest landscape becomes the glaring starlike horizon of a major city. And isn’t that feeling, that little smile that makes its way to your face unbidden, coaxed out by the world like a feral dog and a gentle hand, isn’t that similar to the tears that bud in my eyes as I watched my brother and sister in law say I do? It’s not too dissimilar, the resilience of flowers in November, the way they seem to glow through a veil of snow and smog, like a smile across TSA barriers, like an unsaid open-door invite, like a reason to make it home at the end of the day.
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