funeral pyre

the other day i was introduced to a certain program through which i was able to recover certain things which had been lost to me since may of 2004.

that is, many of my favorite songs from the earlier albums of shakira, mana, bacilos; from cds i had bought in argentina or shortly after the first time i ever set foot in south america.

i've been wondering if this has opened up a pandora's box. all these songs bring back memories (as songs do with everyone). for example, si te vas brings to my mind an image of all of us on sister mary's porch that one night, drinking beer and coke, mp and i flirting by a tree in the yard.



it's fine that a song brings back memories. notice i did not say happy memories. because when i think of that scene i am helplessly transported a few weeks or months in the future and i remember the depression, the feeling of not being part of my life, of just floating through the necessary activities, the obsession, holding on to every word (no matter how ridiculous) from mp, and it makes me sad. i know i'm not the same person i was back then, but i can't help but feel sorry for miss e version 20.5. there is nothing great i can say to her about the object of her obsessions and the propulsant of her depression - that yeah, you do see him again, but it won't be the same (it's never the same - that's why it didn't make any sense to make a sequel to dirty dancing); things won't turn out how you've imagined them but that's ok, after the swamp of bullshit you'll have to wade through, you'll find marble to support you with stripes and ribbons throughout at which you'll lose yourself staring, AND IT WILL ALL BE OK.

later, i thought back even further about miss e versions 19.25-75 (steve-o) and all the useless writing that he inspired - at the end of that summer i gave that notebook and most of everything else i'd written about him as a "gift" to him, wrapped in a yellow biohazard bag (i'm not kidding). what followed was what i then considered the happiest month in recent memory.

that made me think about all the useless writing i had done on mp. what could i do? i could rip all the pages from my notebooks, all the sad sad poems folded in my nuclear engineering notebook (written to keep my tears at bay or at least to release them before the start of class because everyone knows THERE'S NO CRYING IN NUCLEAR ENGINEERING!), the desperate pleading pages in my sketch book that he inspired; i would wrap them up and send them to him, similar to what i had done with the garbage i wrote about steve-o.

another option would be to burn it all; fold all the pages into odd shapes and stack them on top of each other to make a pyramid, which would be put on something that floats, then set on fire, and sent in flames out to a lake or ocean or river.

maybe after i free myself of those lasting (infinitesimal though they may be) threads of words and garbage, i can finally sing to "estoy aqui" or "no creo" without getting choked up.