you_are_the_things_you_don't_throw_away raze she is not just those things. she is all of these things. i don't know what my selected history says about me, but if we spent a while digging through the boxes in each other's basements and garages, we'd learn at least half of all we'd ever need to know about who we are and how we got that way. at least that's the message behind the song a dream wrote. "she's a vegetable, she's a vegetable, she's a vegetable," goes the chorus, and it sounds happy. it sounds like a celebration. maybe she's a carrot. maybe she's celery. 140425 ... ovenbird If this is true, then the person I was before making a move to the west coast nearly twenty years ago was subjected to ruthless erasure. I moved from my childhood home to a graduate college dorm and could only take a few things with me. I moved from there to a tiny one bedroom apartment, then to a horrible basement suite, then to a townhouse when I had my first baby, then to the co-op where I live now. All the spaces have been small, which doesn’t leave much room for storing the physical artifacts of my past. So I was forced to let most of them go. My parents slowly got rid of everything that was mine–artwork, books, stuffed animals, most of the ephemera of years spent playing recitals and performing in plays. What is left is words–journals that run back as far as the seventh grade; a “bedtime book” that my first boyfriend and I passed back and forth in which we wrote each other letters to read before falling asleep; a handful of letters I received from friends and family; letters from the boy who loved me briefly when I was seventeen. Almost everything I have fits in three bankers boxes and while I grieve how much is lost, I am glad for what remains. Because ultimately I am only the stories I tell about myself, and those are preserved in notebooks with crumbling faux leather covers and in manila envelopes stuffed with cards and notes that represent the people who have loved me. I have been forced, against my inclinations, to be a selective archivist and maybe this means that I now hold the things that are most precious–the narrative histories that outline who I once was and what shaped me. The process is ongoing. Though there are gaps, I have continued to journal regularly since 1995 and that tells you most of what you need to know about me. I am a person who has always built my life from words–secret musings, rambling letters to those I love, emails that have turned into novels. The internet took away a lot of the physicality of that writing, eroded the permanence of putting pen to paper which is perhaps why blather feels like such a miracle to me. There is a permanence here that defies the prevailing character of the online world and so, as I live out my fifth decade on this planet there is another thing I’ll keep–every word that lands in this red place, every small attempt to write the story of how I have lived in this failing body in this brutally beautiful world. 251109 what's it to you? who go blather from