3/26/07

remember the time you drove all night

Stop and think about all the things you've left in your wake over the course of your life. All the little things that bring Haiku-like definition to the life you think you know so well.
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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