Little Yellow Envelope

I had a fantasy that by moving to Boston, to a place I had nothing and knew no one, I'd have some peace and quiet, and in the quiet, I'd be able to figure things out. Maybe I have figured a few things out; but mostly the quiet has come from having no one in particular to talk to, and the peace has been disturbed by being always lost and uneasy. "Which way to Brighton?"

Sometimes I think that the other people in my life offer me a kind of mirror—through them I can see a reflection of myself; through their reactions, I get some understanding of who I actually am. And without them I get confused…

* * *

I keep a little yellow envelope, full to bursting with the small set of photos, postcards and memorabilia I've decided to keep. I don't keep things. I blame it on the frequent moves, but I don't know if that's the real reason: I write a journal on a cheap legal pad; I write in it nearly every day; and when I fill up the pad, I throw it out. It's served its purpose. It's printed ephemera. I take another pad from the 10-pack and start again.

My yellow envelope is the arbitrary pile of the relics I've decided to keep.

Sometimes I think if I look at these pictures and postcards, I'll see my past in a new light and learn something new about myself. But the wisdom in this envelope is oracular, and the answers don't come easy. One scrap says, "Life was simpler in America. (Our life.)" Another says, "Chris's Life" and then offers a short list of alternate possibilities:

• balloon animals
• merchant
• kayak instructor / outdoorsman
• masseuse
• ghost writer / political speech writer

Yet another: "How to Fend Off an Alligator." (Tap or punch the alligator on the snout or behind the ears to make it back away.) Another: "I hope that everything that was broken last year gets fixed this year." (It didn't.)

There's a long black feather in the envelope.

There's a stone, wrapped in a piece of paper that says nothing.

I don't know how to make sense of any of it.

* * *

This weekend I saw the woman who gave me the stone. We strolled through the refurbished tenements of New York's Lower East Side. ("Early morning traffic is audible, as is the cry fishmongers.") The buildings, we noticed, had layers and layers of old secrets—here the exposed bricks showed the outline of another, older building long ago torn down; here there'd been a fire. My friend talked to me about palimpsests—old reused parchments which, after time, begin to show all of their collected layers. Their rich secrets are only known after the passage of time. Words accumulate; no erasure is complete; and in the end, there are layers upon layers of sense.

I don't know how to make sense of any of it.

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