Lesson Twenty-One: Inside Boxes, Behind Doors

We have almost finished renovating the house.It looks great. Jess and I have developed that ‘pride of ownership’ realtors are always on about.

But I’ve been avoiding the garage. It’s the last thing to organize.

Everything that doesn’t have a clear place in the house gets relegated to the piles and chaos of the garage.We’ve hauled these things through probably half a dozen moves: boxes of children’s out-grown clothes, cherished books that seemed so powerfully profound when first read that I can hardly remember now, the trunk I moved most of my worldly possession in,
when I first came to Victoria ten years ago.

And then I found it: A box filled with the poetry I had written in college.Most of it from two years of creative writing classes, and most of that to Jess, during the start of our love affair.

Odd bits and scraps that made up the yard stick of my emotional depth, as a twenty-year-old in love. Before kids and mortgages and businesses… before I was of any use to anyone.

I look through the box with a mixture of curiosity and horror.The writing is a mixture of raw, vulgar confession, and experiences stolen from the lives of people who had lived more interesting ones.

And so in this garage of displaced things, important enough to keep, yet not quite fitting in anywhere, I wonder, where does this part of me fit in now?

Don’t get me wrong, I have a very creative job, which I love, and those countless poems gave me a foundation in writing that has served me well.

But what strikes me is that while the sentiment was awkward and tripping, there is also a naive energy and spirit about them. A sense of discov-ery perhaps. A passionate need to probe deeper is what propelled the words onto the page. It doesn’t matter so much what the words were, but rather that they were coming out at all.

So that awkward, gushing twenty-year-old self is like my garage. I want to keep a bit of him around, but I’m not quite sure where I can fit him in.

Perhaps he’s simply a reminder to stay curious, probe deeper, ask why, put up a fight sometimes, and never settle.

What about you? Does that awkward, innocent, idealistic younger you ever come out of where you’ve stored him away?



Principles of Persuassion by Shane Spark