When Genius Failed
Tim McGraw, "Live Like You Were Dying"
Pikman - Day Four
Bath Bombs from Hydra Or, anything from my wish list.
It sucked the first time. It still sucks now. Post Date: 8/31/04
Original Journal Date: 8/30/04 So, for one of the things I'm starting work on, I'm trying to dig up old journal entries. I'm a purger. It's my nature. Every once in a while, I start to feel like there's too much I'm supposed to be answering for, so I throw away all of my clothes, or my books or sell my collection of Strawberry Shortcake dolls or just eliminate people. It's what I do, and four or so years ago when it all got too heavy that time, I purged most of my writing. It just seemed necessary. And now, of course, I'm trying to dig it back up. I'm not trying to dig it all back up, and most of the funny, cute, sarcastic entries that are what I'm looking for are still available, but there are two entries I can't find that I now wish I still had. One is fairly meaningless. It's the entry about watching porn with C and D in Reseda. I could recreate that by spending a day with them next week and remembering it all if I had to. But the other one, that's harder to replicate. It's the entry from the day I found out that Rob shot himself. I remember making the conscious decision to get rid of that entry. I remember reading it and saying "I don't need it, because I'll never forget how that felt. I don't need the words to remind me." And then I trashed it. I remember the construct of the entry. How it was about how I came home from that bar that doesn't even exist any more and I didn't cry. And I went to the gym and it was late at night and I opened up the windows in front of the treadmill so the space would fill with all this cold air and I ran and ran and ran and ran until it hurt so much to be breathing in the cold air and pumping it into my lungs that I finally was able to go into the bathroom and throw up and cry. I remember the entry. I remember the night. And you know what? I was right. I don't need those words to remember how it felt. I can go outside, like I did tonight, into these perfect desert nights that are the reason I moved to Vegas to begin with. And I can sit next to the pool and let the wind rush over me and I can close my eyes and wait a few minutes and feel exactly the same way I felt that night. Exactly that awful. But there was one thing that I didn't think of when I got rid of that entry. I didn't think of the fact that now, almost ten full years later, I would have lost the words to translate what those feelings were. I don't have any words to say "The moment felt as vacant as ..." or "It hurt in the way that ..." I guess in some ways I feel good that I haven't let the walls come up so much that I can still feel like what that night felt like. But it terrifies me that I can't find the words to tell you what it felt like. I couldn't recreate that writing if I tried. And I'm not sure when that happened. And I don't like it. I did a lot of purging that year. I trashed that entry. I finally threw away the few things of his that I had left ... a pair of shorts, some chopsticks and a tape from my answering machine. Somehow, I kept myself from trashing the memory of that feeling, but now I keep wondering if that memory is really going to be enough in the end. Maybe I should have kept something tangible.