Mar 26 2010
The Closet…
The other night I am at Alisa’s house and we are drinking wine on her patio and we are talking about what it is to leave things behind. We are both verging on being of a certain age although truthfully it’s hard for me to accept that neither one of us are not still in our early twenties, how we used to be and still are as far as I’m concerned. Nevertheless we’ve known each other since we were ten and we both know some things by now about things left behind.
Sadly, all that I’m thinking about on the left behind front is merely a certain Bruce Springsteen album that I literally played until the grooves were no longer groovy. I played it in San Diego in my room, I played it in Costa Mesa, I played it in Long Beach and after Long Beach I don’t think I ever played it again. I wasn’t tired of Bruce (although okay, yeah I was– really tired), but in talking to Alisa, a yearning for the loss of that album shot through me so intensely it felt for a moment like I might have fallen off of the earth and into some sort of black hole where I would exist in a state of suspended loss forever.
It was like all of a sudden everything that had ever mattered, including the person I’d been and one day might still become had been stripped to it’s very essence: that particular record album. Mind you, there were other albums that had been discarded, many– but at that moment on Alisa’s patio it was crushingly clear to me that the one thing in my life that had ever mattered– my Bruce Springsteen album– was now lost to me forever and all that was left was for me to pick up the shattered pieces of my life and bravely soldier on.
Bruceless.
The album in question was important because it had been given to me by a buddy who was trying to improve my musical tastes at a time when my musical tastes were still relatively unformed and should have already been formed. It was also about possession and duration– all the things I tend to apply to actual relationships retrospectively– typically after they’ve failed: things like where the album had been, where I had been, how me and that album had… oh, okay, I’ll say it: gone through a lot together.
Sigh.
The thing: last I checked, that album hadn’t done jack other than to take up space on my bookshelves until I relegated it to the attic with the rest of my albums fifteen years or so ago only to spend the next fifteen years carting it around from attic to garage to attic like the baggage it had become.
“It’s just a closet. That’s all you get.”
We are drinking wine and I’ve been– there is no way to say this without sounding like an idiot– pining for my Bruce album. Oh, the attics and basements it had been stored in, the neglect! How could I have left it on the curb so casually? What had I been thinking?
Me (To Alisa): “WTF?” I had absolutely no idea what she’d been talking about. Still, she’s an old friend of mine and I tried gamely to focus. To hear whatever the hell it was she’d been saying to me.
“You get a closet. That’s all. Maybe you have things to put in it, and maybe you don’t. I’m always surprised by the people I meet who end up there. The lives they’ve led, or haven’t led. What they used to have or not have, and always how little any of that matters anymore. It’s just one closet. What you get. When you go. There. ”
To that one room elderly care place that concurrently terrifies me and thrills me.
It terrifies me, because I have an aversion to bedrooms with vinyl floors and sheets that don’t have a certain Egyptian Cotton thread count. It thrills me because I love the idea of ending up in a dorm room situation once I finally get old enough to really appreciate it. Bridge 24/7? Bring it.
So we talked about Alisa’s closet theory for a while, and I liked her theory because after all the weird ass emotional crap I apparently attach to my record albums and God knows what else, I was relieved to affirm that I had been right in setting it out on the curb. That its value to me had absolutely nothing to do with the object it was; the value was derived solely from the experiences I’d had that it ended up indexing.
I understood then, after my WTF moment, that its value could never be lost to me because it had already become– because it was already– solely my personal history of a certain time and place on the planet important to and remembered by nobody but me.