16 2 / 2009
Former lives.
So here I am, packing up our belongings into boxes and preparing them to move to our new place this weekend. I’m going through the closet, and I can’t help but see all of Luke’s shoeboxes and containers full of what I think is probably old photos and keepsakes. Two thoughts come to me:
1) I can’t believe that I no longer have anything from highschool or earlier. Several years ago when I went up to college and moved out of my parents house, they packed up all my things in my bedroom in boxes to turn it into their home office. They put the boxes out in the garage, where over the next two years they were infested with mice. My dad ended up throwing everything away that I owned, everything I didn’t bring up north to my tiny dorm. All my videos, my photos, drawings, letters, diaries, ribbons and awards I’d won, recordings. He says they were all destroyed from mouse pee, but I still can’t help but wonder if I could have salvaged some of it. I’m still disappointed whenever I think about it. I have nothing to remember the young carefree me with anymore.
2) It’s crazy that those boxes of Luke’s contain his former life. We’ve been together for over a year and I feel like it’s been our entire existence. I feel like I know him inside and out and that we have a perfect understanding of each other. But when I see those containers with his former things, it reminds me that he had a life before me. He was from a different state, had different friends, different hobbies, went to school, probably did all the same dumb things I did as a kid. It’s like this whole other person that I don’t know is inside those boxes. Most people would probably be curious what’s inside them, but I’m actually terrified of them for some reason. I’m nervous to see what his old girlfriends looked like, and what kind of life he lead before being with me. I know that seems silly, but it’s true.
Maybe I’m just jealous that I don’t have anything to show him. I feel like my entire adolescence has been erased.
