On Memories
So I've got this big 5 star trapper keeper (that's what it was called when I bought it like 12 years ago) that I keep correspondence and anything else of particular interest. There are photos, playbills, awards, and other assorted goodies, but it's mostly letters. It starts in 98. I guess that's the first time I got a letter that I cared about keeping. There's also the news article that explained more about my Uncle Marty than my family ever did.
I normally ignore the thing. It just sits in a box or on a shelf and I forget it exists. I was cleaning up my room a bit today and realized that since Bob was coming home, I could put his letters in there. The mistake was opening that binder when I was alone. The very first thing is a batch of articles I found in the garage of my dad's house when we went back to Michigan to sell it. That was in November of 2000. The articles were from December of 99. So for a year, all I knew about why my uncle was in prison was that he got high and hurt somebody. Those articles scared me. The truth they hold literally makes my skin crawl. But I keep them, because no one told me what happened. There they sit in a page protector, the first thing you see when you unzip the thing and open it up.
There's so much stuff in the binder that I can't just flip to the back though. The next thing I find is a letter from my mom from about a year after I moved to Florida. She's saying that she hopes I don't think she's a bad mother, and that she did her best. She asks if it's really her fault that her best wasn't good enough. After that is a letter from my sister, from the summer she went to Belgium to see her dad. She wants to come visit me in Florida when she gets back so we can "hang out and be sisters," something we'd never done before. She also says her dad thinks of me as his daughter and would love it if I could send him pictures. I haven't seen him since he was deported when I was 6 or 7, when I though he was dad.
The next major flip is to a letter from my Aunt Erin. She talks about how she's proud of me for doing well in school, and that she's glad that the two of us can talk about Uncle Marty and how we both just don't know how to feel about him. She says she can't believe he did it, and she loves him, but can't forgive him. I still feel that way. I still identify the most with my Aunt Erin, more that anyone in my family. I always have, even though for as long as I've remembered she's always lived across the country.
Eventually the correspondence thins out. I got a computer and now we all send emails, but those letters scare me. There are a lot of playbills and theatre critique sheets from high school. Playbills from Broadway and the West End. Letters from Robbie that are a little scary, and that was it.
I really should never open that binder when I'm alone. There are good things in it, but most of it is just awful. I need a new binder, a new start. I can't handle the horror show that is my adolescence.
I normally ignore the thing. It just sits in a box or on a shelf and I forget it exists. I was cleaning up my room a bit today and realized that since Bob was coming home, I could put his letters in there. The mistake was opening that binder when I was alone. The very first thing is a batch of articles I found in the garage of my dad's house when we went back to Michigan to sell it. That was in November of 2000. The articles were from December of 99. So for a year, all I knew about why my uncle was in prison was that he got high and hurt somebody. Those articles scared me. The truth they hold literally makes my skin crawl. But I keep them, because no one told me what happened. There they sit in a page protector, the first thing you see when you unzip the thing and open it up.
There's so much stuff in the binder that I can't just flip to the back though. The next thing I find is a letter from my mom from about a year after I moved to Florida. She's saying that she hopes I don't think she's a bad mother, and that she did her best. She asks if it's really her fault that her best wasn't good enough. After that is a letter from my sister, from the summer she went to Belgium to see her dad. She wants to come visit me in Florida when she gets back so we can "hang out and be sisters," something we'd never done before. She also says her dad thinks of me as his daughter and would love it if I could send him pictures. I haven't seen him since he was deported when I was 6 or 7, when I though he was dad.
The next major flip is to a letter from my Aunt Erin. She talks about how she's proud of me for doing well in school, and that she's glad that the two of us can talk about Uncle Marty and how we both just don't know how to feel about him. She says she can't believe he did it, and she loves him, but can't forgive him. I still feel that way. I still identify the most with my Aunt Erin, more that anyone in my family. I always have, even though for as long as I've remembered she's always lived across the country.
Eventually the correspondence thins out. I got a computer and now we all send emails, but those letters scare me. There are a lot of playbills and theatre critique sheets from high school. Playbills from Broadway and the West End. Letters from Robbie that are a little scary, and that was it.
I really should never open that binder when I'm alone. There are good things in it, but most of it is just awful. I need a new binder, a new start. I can't handle the horror show that is my adolescence.