As I’ve mentioned, the past few months I’ve spent a good chunk of time in my parent’s house in my hometown. And let me tell you, the memories flow much easier when you’re surrounded by the physical streets, floorboards, benches, trees, backyards and sometimes people of those past experiences.
I’m grateful for my elephant memory (that’s a thing, right?) but not all memories are pleasant. It’s why movies like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind are made and why after a relationship ends one usually throws away or (depending on fire pit accessibility) burns the relationship relics collected over the months or years.
With my first serious boyfriend, those memories were kept in a pink and black, shiny Victoria’s Secret box. I can not for the life of me remember what I originally bought, especially considering most of my underwear purchases continue to come in packs of threes from Target, but origin aside, it was the box.
Birthday cards, Phillies tickets, faded receipts (cause yeah, I’m that kind of hoarder), a picture from a photo booth in Chicago; classic relationship items. Even though our break-up in 2009 was fairly amicable, I did eventually throw most of the items away.
But when my second serious relationship ended in 2015, not only was the break-up extremely ugly, the infamous relationship ‘box’ had become much less tangible. The contents of my Victoria’s Secret box had been replaced with hard drives, folders on my desktop, conversations saved in my Inbox, ‘tagged’ photos’ absolutely outnumbering the physical ones. Memories of our relationships collected a lot faster when it was data, not a dried daisy.
When my first boyfriend and I broke up in 2009, I thought I was never going to be able to watch The Sopranos ever again. The Sopranos was the first show I ever ‘shared’ with someone. We were together eating penne with vodka sauce and garlic bread during the memorable black-out series finale. But when my second relationship ended, I thought I was never going to be able to watch anything ever again. The shows we watched together accumulated fast. With streaming readily in the mix, we didn’t have a show, we had shows.
In 2009, I had Facebook, I had a digital camera, I had a computer, sure, it was a digital time. But the digital footprint of my next relationship became bigger and ‘burning’ the memories of our relationship had become trickier.
With the box you had to be picky. It was only so big. If you wanted to keep something, it had to be worth it. I remember feeling lucky because my Victoria’s Secret box was a bit bigger than your average shoebox so it was ok to keep a newspaper clipping commemorating the Phillies winning the World Series (Looking back, I don’t know how I was convinced to leave my own birthday dinner to go get drunk in a parking lot). Bottom line, you didn’t keep bad memories in the box.
But when the confines of a physical box no longer have to be considered, every memory, good and bad, becomes salvageable. I had full, 8-hour, passive aggressive Google Chat conversations from a day at work. Emails that were mean. Emails that were apologetic. All these items painted a clear picture of the de-evolution of our relationship and yet I couldn’t get myself to burn the box and delete forever.
Every now and then I’d catch myself going down some weird memory lane. Reviewing what I knew was my life but felt more like some Tim Burton-directed nonsense. The flimsy framework of our relationship was painfully obvious in every chat or email and, worse, each time I’d find some new, painful memory whose detriment I didn’t realize at the time. I’d suddenly be fired up, grateful for that not being my life anymore, furious that it ever was. When there’s a fire, we’re taught to leave everything behind, save yourself. So why even after I did save myself did I keep running back into the building?
I spent a big chunk of that relationship convincing myself that A) Things are fine and B) All the bad stuff is as much my fault as it is his when in fact the correct answer was always C) None of the above. Leave immediately. You are going to be shocked at how happy you are capable of being once you’re away from this. I was continually trying to prove to myself, to others and to him that everything was fine. This came with a lot of excuses, a lot of confusion and a lot of “It’s not that bad.” The evidence proving “Everything is fine!” simply did not exist and it showed in my attempts.
Where my relationship made me feel crazy, my ‘digital memories’ reminded me I wasn’t. And once I finally understood the reality of my own life, I wasn’t ready to suffocate the all-collecting cloud of proof. It’s not that I forced myself to look at these things but I was grateful they were floating in space when I needed them. They’ve made it so that now as I’m surrounded by the physical spaces and places of that time in my life, I am able to be here without doubt and with confidence.
I’ve thought a lot about what I’ll choose to remember from this time and what ‘boxes’ or spaces I’ll make for my future relationships. It’s been awhile since I’ve been on a memorable date, let alone one worth saving the cocktail napkin from. And while I’ll probably always find it tempting to save those physical items, I’m learning that memories, even the good ones, often feel heavier when they are thrown together, put under the bed and only remembered on a rainy day. It’s why I’m ok with my shitty memories floating above me in the cloud and why instead of hiding future receipts and cocktail napkins in a box under my bed, I think I rather stick them right on my fridge to enjoy every day with my manicot’ (That’s my cute way of saying “Enjoy life now.” and that I’m still able to watch The Sopranos).