2008
pictures of you
What do you do with the pictures? What happens to eleven years of snapshots and cheesy portrait studio enlargements, wedding albums and vacation pictures? Horrid Walmart engagement photos that stand as a forever reminder of a very bad hair day, murky underwater snorkeling shots of unidentified fish in Hawaii, precious photos of the first moments of parenthood?
What do you do with the shriveled balloons on your first valentines day together, the souvenirs from your trip to NYC in the spring of 1999, with the birthday cards filled with sappy handwritten notes?How do you split up a decades worth of personalized Christmas tree ornaments, carefully chosen during a holiday shopping trip each year – even the pets’ names carefully added in with permanent marker.
Who gets the home videos – hours upon hours beginning with teary eyed ‘I do’s’ and extending through first breaths and birthday parties and wobbly steps and Christmas mornings. Who keeps the locks of hair lovingly saved from the first hair cut? How can you divide the stick figure drawing of your family of four, proudly rendered at preschool in bright crayola marker? What about wedding rings engraved with words of forever and partially filled in baby books and anniversary gifts and ticket stubs and random shoe boxes full of 11 years worth of collected nostalgia?
When you are faced with separating two lives that have been wholly intertwined for so long you discover that you are surrounded by representations of that relationship, both concrete and symbolic. Your house is filled with a million symbols of the bonds, of the happy times when anything seemed possible, of the family you built and the history you shared and the plans you made. When all is said and done, and it all comes down to the final weeks of living under the same roof, those mementos are all that remain of both dream and reality. Keepsakes of a life that no longer exists, they are both more priceless and more meaningless than you ever thought possible.
And the final question lingers…what on earth do you do with the memories?
Visit Me: Awakenings: Navigating The Spaces Between In and Out
Memories can be such a double edged sword. I like to think they are the basis of what makes us who we are. They are reminders of lessons learned and good times had. Sometimes they haunt us and other times the are a reason for a surprise smile.
I once burned a box full of letters, gifts, and memories from my ex. It was good for me, theraputic, but I’m sure not for everyone. I don’t think there’s really anything you can do except move on. In hopes that you make new memories and rember the old only to remind you of who you are and where you’ve come from.