Life Packing

It's kind of interesting what you come across when you have to pack up your life. I'm into saving little keepsakes that might, one day, go into a scrapbook. As of now, I don't have one, so I keep all that sort of stuff in plastic bags and a little tackle-box I have. I'm guessing it's a tackle-box because it has a little metal etching of fish and hooks on the outside cover, but that might just be a random decoration for an otherwise plain old box.

At the same time, I'm not an amasser of junk, at least I try not to be. So whenever I move, or whenever I'm bored, I like to go through what I've saved over the years and throw out the stuff that seems inconsequential. Just now, going through this little box that has blindly stored these "memories" since law school, I threw out a whole bunch of ticket stubs from the last six years, dating as far back as junior year of college when I took a Chunnel train from London to Brussels for a weekend, with a stop-off in Paris before heading back to NYU classes at our school near Bedford Sq. I was there with a girl I had started dating, and it was way too early into our relationship to be going off to Paris for Valentines Day. I remember feeling kind of depressed during the trip, because I was in what I think is the most romantic city in the world (cliches aside), and yet I wasn't there with someone I was in love with. Still, for whatever reason, despite the things that this specific ticket calls to mind, I decided to throw it away. I reason that I can't save every darn ticket stub from the rest of my life, so I might as well not save any of them. Maybe that logic is flawed, or maybe I'm just waiting to save an especially important ticket stub, a ticket stub that's so important that it will cause me to break my newly-created no-ticket-stub-saving policy. We'll have to wait and see if such a ticket stub produces itself at some point in the future.

I also happen to be hoarding a decent amount of cold hard cash that I haven't spent because I deem it "lucky." Somewhere in this pile of $67 is a $1 bill that was given to me by the Rabbi who bar mitzvahed me. He, in turn, claimed to have gotten it from Rabbi Schneerson, the now-deceased spiritual leader of Chabad. The rest of it is money I found that I decided not to spend because, technically, it wasn't really mine to begin with.

But other than the box with the memorabilia, there's something else in my room that I still haven't had the heart to dismantle because it's something that I will never recreate once its gone. The magnetic poetry I have on my fridge has, over the last two years, slowly transformed itself from loose, meaningless words, to combined sentences that actually remind me of the things I was thinking or feeling when I put them together. Before I rip them apart and toss the individual pieces into a cookie jar that I have designated as my magnetic poetry holder pre-new-refrigerator, I wanted to write them down, lock them in the annals of history for posterity, both mine and yours:

"Know only that every impression is a silhouette of an angel."

"Make him experiment as an electric sex masterpiece."

"Mount cigarette latex with dry junk."

"They investigate said glorious metaphor."

"Open your suffering so my canvas can imagine death."

"Demand."

"I am always my young life."

"You never sense the rhythm of our song."

"Live passion but ask who looms in the smoke."

"I break above harmony."

"Write me empty symbols to capture her black monument."


I don't claim that any of it is deep, and of course it's hard to avoid the melodrama with some of these words that they give you, but each sentence has something about it that calls to mind a specific conversation, a specific moment in this little studio apartment. Maybe they don't mean anything to anyone else, but in my head, they encapsulate the last two years pretty well. Onto new magnetic poetry creations.