Artifacts and Love Letters

Posted on May 1, 2008
Filed Under Uncategorized | 18 Comments

I’m a week off. Somehow everything I’ve scheduled for the first week in May seems like it should be happening NEXT week. I need a pinch, a swift kick in the ass. How did the calendar roll over a whole seven days before I was ready for Mayness?

Coincidentally and perfectly timed for the first day in May, I went to the mailbox this morning and found a package from my college roommate. Apparently she’d been visiting her parent’s home and agreed to clean out the attic where she stumbled upon my old English 201: Medieval and Renaissance Literature notebook. Since I have been known to actually throw out notebooks before course work is complete, before exams are even scheduled, leaving the coffee table free of intolerable clutter but myself noteless for the review of Paradise Lost, the sole reason this artifact of my sophomore spring even exists is that my roommate was, and is, somewhat of a hoarder. Back in our sophomore crash pad, at the end of the semester when we were all packing up our belongings and scattering to summer, she must have thought that someday, just someday she might be able to use my short essay on the difference between Petrarchan and English sonnets and tossed the red marbled notebook with gold-leafed university inscription in a box.

Apparently, just last week, she decided she could finally part with my brilliant dissection of Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus and saw fit to send me the collective meanderings of my 20 year-old brain. And normally I would just chuck the thing. But I paused and became intrigued with the former self that made those immature scribblings and doodling in a handwriting I hardly recognize as my own.

So, as any self absorbed writer would, I’ve now spent hours pouring over my exam booklet on Milton’s Paradise Lost (only a B- earned) and I’ve read my paper on The Second Shepherd’s Play and the juxtaposition of the shepherd’s disrespect for their wives and their simple adoration for the Virgin Mary (A) and I have even re-familiarized myself with the chronology of love as presented in Sir Phillip Sydney’s poem Astrophil and Stella (A-). And I’ve now come to realize that I was one great bull shit artist, quick with some big words and abstract thoughts and wicked with a closing paragraph. This skill with the written word helped me coast through college pretty much unchallenged allowing me to deal with more consuming topics like boys and keg beer and bong hits.

And just when I began to leaf through my notes on rhyme schemes because, well, one never knows when she might need to trot out some brilliance about octets and sextets and quatrains like, say, at Saturday’s dinner party, a hand written letter fell out of the stack of academic drivel and fell onto my lap. A letter I wrote in 1993, probably one of the last I ever penned to my long time boyfriend who I had been dating since 1989. Evidently it was a letter I planned to send to Nepal where he was off on an expedition to find himself, leaving me behind to date several other male contenders and eventually meet My Better Half.

It’s a slice in time, a sweet memento, a slightly yellowed notebook page filled with last words, hinting at the very end of the long-term love affair. It is the only letter that remains out of the sixty or seventy he and I must have exchanged in the five years we were together. For some reason, when I got married, I thought it best to destroy all evidence that I had ever loved another. Now I kind of wish that my college roommate would look again, unearth my freshman anthropology course work, who knows what poignant tidbit might fall from the pages.

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