Sicky McSickerson. I’m not doing much today but puttering around the apartment, hanging the occasional shirt up or painting up, but not much else.
I found a box of Mike’s papers. I’ve found several of these over the past year, and they are always an education. Filled with old school papers, notes from friends, journals from high school, random photographs, bits of half-smoked rolling paper, pencils, broken tidbits, random receipts, business cards, and resumes.
I comb through them, obsessively. If you know Mike well you know that he is, ironically, at heart a very private person. Also, it takes him a long time to process and articulate what he is thinking and feeling—so you don’t always get his reactions and thoughts on things in “real time”, but rather days later. So these little forays into his mind, his past and what he thinks is important enough to chunk into a box and schlep from apartment to apartment to apartment over the past 20 years...well, I find them educational and fascinating.
For instance, a resume from 1996. Mike has no sense of time, so after a story, if you ask “When was that?” you often get a blank stare or something along the lines of: “Hmm...well, I lived on Hawthorne...or wait, no, the house with Tom. And I still had a car so...uh...2002ish? Maybe? You know me and time.” But this resume, a little time capsule, is chock full of dates and jobs and tasks and skills that he has forgotten or buried or just not mentioned.
Also, there are a few binders and notebooks from high school: journals. Granted, not the juicy written-under-the-covers-with-a-flashlight-spill-your-guts journals, but the ones the English teacher assigns you to do weekly. Most people prattle—Mike chose to prattle, but punctuate it with brilliant insight (for a 17 year old!), political rantings, opinion pieces and oddly personal moments. My favorite part was reading his teacher’s responses—a middle aged woman in the 80s, divorced, semi-cultured and pretty funny. As an “adult” now, and a teacher myself, I find myself identifying more with her than teenage Mike.
When we were first dating, I flipped through these boxes and stacks and files looking for the odd love letter or poem—curiosity about what I then thought of as rivals, and now know to be mere precursors. Thoughts of these women (and the occasional introduction to, out of the blue, at a party or other function!!!) infuriated me. I was jealous, found reasons to despise some of these (poor) women, and was all-around insecure. Now, when I come across evidence that he has lived and loved before, I find it kind of touching. The tenderness and clumsiness, the obvious miscommunications, statements of despair, of love—they are beautiful to me now, instead of irritating.
For me, these dusty (sometimes a bit mildewy) boxes are symbolic of our relationship. How it has progressed from two people with two very different pasts, to two people so deeply enmeshed and entwined in each other that their pasts no longer matter. As I put these papers into a new, cleaner box, and tuck in my own odds and ends for safe keeping—as I place our yearbooks side-by-side on the bookshelf—as a love letter slips out of a book, hastily scribbled and never sent—as these things occur, I realize that this man is not mine, but we are each others. A unit. A pair.
And that leaves no room for jealousy. Only a mild curiosity, a wistful longing for years we could have spent together but didn’t. It’s a very nice place to be.
