There's a couple of shelves of overflow books my landlords have left in my downstairs hallway. One of them is called 'Dwelling', an amazing 70's book about creating your own living space; just the kind I like to find by surprise. Inscribed on the inside cover is
12/75
To the future
My love
Karen
Scattered throughout one of my favorite bookstores are things they've found tucked in books over the decades. Pinned to a post is a drugstore photobooth picture of a couple, young & with doubt in their eyes. On the back it says the day Eli was conceived.
A friend lent me a bag last year and in an inside pocket, long forgotten, were several photos and an unsent postcard; a whole little situation which, in this case, didn't give any clues as to the future. In this case too I knew the outcome of the story; I wonder how the other ones turned out.
I was throwing a whole pile of stuff out a while back and a tiny piece of paper escaped to settle against a wall for a few more weeks. I put one song on the tape just for you Nate- guess which one it is. A lost moment, a long-forgotten tape. A mystery.
On the computer I'm using is a bank of 1700 sent emails of the most mundane kind, surely, obviously, every one of them forgotten, all of them belonging to the previous owner, whom I never knew and never will. Unless- will I? If I choose to read nearly two thousand messages about meeting for a sushi lunch or picking up flowers?
We think we know where we've come from, where we're going. But there's a secret history out there that says otherwise. We don't have control of our pasts and realizing this liberates our future. Here's to all we really have control of- little tiny moments as they're happening. My apologies to anyone for whom the technology below doesn't function.
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