She couldn't explain how she'd forgotten everything that happened in her life. There were no words to use to describe the flashes in her brain. Tiny synapses jumped like down wires, a fountain of sparks but no connection. Just a wild energy released into the spaces between. Reaching for the wrinkled poetry of her past she felt that energy stir, a surge from her breast to the very tips of fingers, fluttering on the yellowed paper of a mead notepad.
Cleaning out the years of clutter she'd plowed into the attic suddenly felt much more grueling. Impossible. How could she possibly get through the room without needing to devour every item she touched? She flipped through the notepad, the damp, musty smell wafting through the wind. It felt like she was there, sitting on the riverbank. The milk weed stood tall beside her growing brazenly through the steel water tunnels that carried the cool stream through the road. She skimmed over the pages, eyeing the writing with interest, inspecting the loops of each letter and analyzing the hues of ink. She could remember the fuchsia colored gel pen, and the morning she pulled it from her Christmas stocking, but she couldn't remember writing the poem that cascaded down the page in her own cursive handwriting. Words came forward, words like agony and insignificance, misunderstood and unwanted. Some pages started in careful penmanship and ended paragraphs later in angry scratch slanted in sharp displays of aggression. Her brain flashed, hormonal angst, and she tossed in back into the box with a draining sigh. She scanned the room like the expansion of that old river, pulling in it's energy. An old nightstand short a leg sat crookedly in the corner, triangulated folded notes poured from a tipped shoebox, their faces covered in glittered words of TTYL, WBS, SSL,SSS, WBASAP! I LOVE YOU! A tattered blue curtain laid balled up on the floor with Christmas cards tossed carefully on top. Old posters were bound with rubber bands atop the bookshelf, and Stephen King, V.C. Andrews, and Dean Koontz sat stoically as the The Baby Sitter's Club and R.L. Stine seemed to form a meek pile on the lower shelves, covers bent and bowing.
How many times had she come into the room with the intention of finally pulling it together? How often did she lay awake thinking to herself how much she'd get accomplished tomorrow? It was different now. The energy was roaring in her ear like white noise on full volume, buzzing. She couldn't think straight with every day of her past yelling at her in a language she could no longer understand. The time such a task would require, why it was unfathomable. The need to drink in the details until the language was renewed would be insurmountable, the task itself took the air right out of the room, and she couldn't breathe. Turning to leave the room she stopped herself, not without resistance, and let loose a whimper. It was no longer a choice, it was a decision, a decision to regain control of the very core of ID.
It scared her to think that she might be throwing away her past. She had transformed from the girl she had been into the person she was now with such enormity she regarded them as two separate wholes. To forget the first, wouldn't that be forming a black hole of sorts? An thirsty energy pulling in all that is around it without prejudice or replacement? If you take the roots from a tree it would wither. She can't remember things, she can't explain why, but she can feel them. She smell the memories, she tastes the experience, and she can hear the sound of faraway loves and lessons learnt. If she discards the tactical keepsakes of all those things she was, will be cease to be those things? Is that killing the little girl who was shed cells ago and changed through and through like the foliage of a deciduous tree?
It was scarier to think that she could throw away her future on the fear of losing her past. It flashes through, "Nothing to fear but fear itself" and nods in agreement. Breaking life down into small equations made the math so much easier, but the truth remains that we aren't not mathematical equations to be solved or rationalized with rules and theorems. We cannot be dissected by human hands and searched through by scalpels to find the meaning of our being. There is no file cabinet with neatly scrawled tabs that guide you through. You cannot not pull out the S section to find your card on Self-Esteem, there aren't charts of the ebb and flow of your emotional existence. "Say it dipped here in the months which coincide with the time that her lover left her, and raised again with the entry of her new found love, therefore it is conclusive that her self-esteem is reflective of the opinion of others" Oh,contra ire, that would be a fallacy, yes.
Therefore, this room, it really was nothing but symbols.2a+3a=5a>2b+3b=5b where a=old photos of her smiling and b= poems about not being happy. Nothing but a debate inside about the importance of her past and the influence it has on who she is as a person and who she will become. If she lets this room of unsolved equations and forgotten languages pull her in then she will be missing the new experiences of today by mulling the math of yesterday. She regards this as a moment of discovery, a connection made, a wire restored. Never will she be a hoarder of nostaglia. If she can harness her energy then she will be the master of her own existence, and therefore the meaning of life will become clearer by her actions as the actions should no longer be restrained by the fear of losing yesterday.
