For Grace, After A Party

A recent post over at Eat Move Write got Emily and me talking.

The post (which you should really hop over and read yourself) discusses staying in touch with yourself and all of those past stages in your life (and being open about those parts of you within relationships). As the post says, it’s not about keeping up to date with old flames or staying in touch with people you went to high school with, but instead remembering who you were at all of those phases in life. I’d perused the entry a few days before and didn’t think about it again until Emily mentioned it one day at lunch.

Our discussion finally made something click for me.

Over the past few months, I’ve connected with a few things from my past that had totally slipped off the radar. Since I’m moving in with Nathan in a couple of weeks, I’ve been shuffling a lot of my belongings around in my room, deciding what’s worth moving and what just needs to go. I cleaned out my car to make the moving process easier, emptied my closets, and sorted through a lot of unlabeled boxes that had really never been opened since I moved the last time.

The things I came across during the move brought back so many memories of who I was just a few years ago. Dozens (no joke.) of mix CDs burned for me by friends (many of which kept me company on my long drives to visit Nathan at college), evidence of the time I tried to learn to knit, boxes and boxes of craft supplies for when I would attempt to use those kinds of projects as a creative outlet. And while some of these things pop into my life every now again, they’re not nearly as present as they were four or five years ago.

A favorite song resurfaced, which I can definitely tie to a slew of lengthy car trips and which was often played on repeat:

And a crafty project (were you ever into Artist Trading Cards? it was a short-term obsession for me, and I discovered about a gazillion of them in boxes this week), likely created when my friend Lauren and I were skipping out on our American Sign Language class (not that we didn’t love the subject—we just didn’t love the instructor):

And finally, a note reminding me of a favorite, favorite poem:

For Grace, After A Party

You do not always know what I am feeling.
Last night in the warm spring air while I was
blazing my tirade against someone who doesn't
interest
me, it was love for you that set me
afire,
and isn't it odd? for in rooms full of
strangers my most tender feelings
writhe and
bear the fruit of screaming. Put out your hand,
isn't there
an ashtray, suddenly, there? beside
the bed? And someone you love enters the room
and says wouldn't
you like the eggs a little
different today?
And when they arrive they are
just plain scrambled eggs and the warm weather
is holding.

-Frank O’Hara

I have an inexplicable attachment to that poem, and I’d completely forgotten about it until I rediscovered the title last week. Isn’t in crazy how something that you were so fond of can be so easily forgotten later?

During this transition in which I’m moving into a new, positive, amazing phase of life, it’s really strange to revisit so many of the things from the past that make up Paige. And it’s exciting to decide which ones will move forward with me into the future too.