Papercuts

Sometimes I think that rather than growing, people are diminished.  That we are all chiselled, or whittled down, by the experiences of life and that what is left right at the end - the shapes, the dark hollows - is what makes the man.

We are only who we are in the moment, until another piece is cut away.

This evening, my mother pulled down a stack of my old notebooks and photos and made me pore through them and decide what to throw away.  They were cluttering shelves we needed for my brothers, she said.

There were pictures of me, a nineteen year old bridesmaid at my best friend's wedding, seventeen and awkwardly smiling next to a crush at a class barbecue, twenty four and pretending to be worldly far away from home.  

There were old planners in which I had made tiny, confessional notes in the margins of the day:

"In which the cab driver looked in the rearview mirror, told D and I 

that we made a nice couple, and I couldn't answer for laughing.  

Later though, at work, he sent me a message that said, "I think he's right".  

There were old letters pieced together from quotes from Beatles songs and catchphrases that I used to throw around with friends that I don't see anymore. 

And there were photos such as this one, of a girl who knew what it was to be loved and held and to be loving, and holding. 

Whenever I'm faced with memories like this, I experience a strange mixed feeling.  One part of me wants to drink them in, absorb them, scatter them on the floor like shards of glass and lie in them so they become imprinted forever; hundreds of tiny cuts on my skin.  Desperate, I want to gather them in armfuls and kneel and weep for everything gone by.

Another part of me can't get away from them fast enough.

At first I wonder if I should save the photos, every last one of them, then wonder what I'm saving them for, if anyone will ever care as much as I did.  I start throwing them out indiscriminately; who cares what I looked like in my prom dress?  Who cares who my best friends were if they're now just shavings on a woodshop floor?

In every photo I see a woman in a new phase of life - a friend, a girlfriend, a first time lover, a newly-minted wanderer - and I see the face of someone who thinks she's finally found her place.  But I put the pictures down and it's back to me, just me, whose priorities and centres of gravity have changed yet again.

The thing about life is that we move through so many experiences so quickly that we have to try and keep something from each one.  And so we think we know who we are and each time, we are wrong the moment we lose something else.

I don't want to juggle rusty razor blades.

What does it matter, I think, if the memories go forgotten?  I don't need reminders of what's been cut away, of who I am not anymore. 

I think that's why I was a serial monogamist, once upon a time.  Each time you move on to someone new, it's easy to forget about what has been left behind.  Now though, there is no dulling the sensation of each cut.  At least I'm finally feeling honest. 

I threw away a great deal tonight.  But I kept that photo. 

Maybe something in me still believes - looking at that picture of a girl who was once loved with a joyful, almost obsessive abandon before it all went sour - that not everything has been lost in vain.