As the long weekend comes to a close I am full of emotion. I went out to Mom’s yesterday to help her get rid of stuff. She’s getting the house ready to sell so she can move back to NYC. Since my Dad died in October, the house feels so strange. I expect him to come around the corner in every room and poke his head in the door. Eerie feeling. I found old photographs and old letters. It is bittersweet of course. Great to see my old photos and find letters from people who’s names i don’t even recognize but it’s also so overwhelmingly sad that i slept most of today. It is weird to look at baby pictures and then through my teens when life seemed so hard. And to find stories i’d written for English classes. From grade school days through high school. I was surprised how well I wrote then. But the stories are all so dark and sad. it left me feeling hungover today and i had a wicked migraine. One good thing was having so many of my memories validated. Scenes I’ve been writing for a memoir are based on events that were discussed in journals and letters that I found. It was a writer’s gold mine. So i lugged a lot of the old paperwork and photos back to the city with me and tried sorting through some of it today. I find it exhausting and disturbing but like rubber necking i can’t help but stare.
