Sat, Nov. 17
... Take a trip down memory lane....
I love going through my old memory boxes... so much of my life from high school and on is in them. Christmas cards, letters, notes, programs from plays I was in, or plays that I saw, birthday cards, grad cards, msn messenger conversations that I printed off, certificates and awards, poems, stories, assignments, old journals, all kinds of things that are just junk to everyone else, but I love them. They're so much of me.
There's a stack of postcards from Ontario and Quebec, from the grade nine Eastern Canada trip, almost five years ago. There's a sheet of typed paper with everyone's comments about the best parts of the trip, and mine was (jokingly) about how I got to fly first class because they were full in second class when I went to meet the rest of the group...
There are the posters and programs for "Merchant of Venice," "The Death and Life of Sneaky Fitch," "Dark of the Moon," "The Promise," "The Challenge," and a ton of other little plays...
There's a stack of about 50 cards from my grad, from family, friends, neighbors, relatives; people who cared enough to remember my big day and celebrate it with me. There's a program from the ceremony, swatches of fabric from my dress, ribbons left over from the decorations in the school...
There are rough drafts of recommendation letters from my high school teachers, trying to sum up three years of work into a page...
There are copies of the letters that I sent all my prayer and financial supporters after both Mexico trips and every SEMP, and the Mexico ones are complete with the original pictures, cut and pasted onto the page...
There's a black coil notebook that Christy and I used when I was in grade eleven, to begin writing our poetry anthology that we wanted to publish together someday, called, "The Effects of Adversity on the Human Spirit"--a title so shamelessly borrowed from an English diploma exam essay topic. The "manuscript" has about forty poems in it, and Christy's and my comments about what the poems were about. We'd wanted it to be like reading the introductions to the poems would be like reading notes that we were writing in class, because that's what they were! We spent most of English 30 and Religious Studies 25 passing the notebook back and forth, writing comments until we had about a page of introduction for each poem. We never finished the book, though. I think we have intros for a little over half the poems...
Journals, dating back to grade nine, with every major event in my life, and some of the not-so-major events, recorded. Some things, I'm so glad I'm finished with, and I've grown past them; others will never change and there are still the same problems there were back then. Oh, maybe not exactly the same, but pretty close...
So many memories, packed away into a few boxes... and the best part is that I'm still adding. My life is still changing, still growing, and more and more memories are becoming a part of me every day. And my boxes are still growing... they're not finished yet, but even so, they're a priceless treasure that is so unbelievably irreplacable.
infinite || abyss
posted at 11:45 p.m.
