I used to be a hoarder. I used to never want to let go of anything. Whenever time would try to drag something away from me, I’d pull onto it for my dear life.
The other day, I decided to let that part of me go. Especially the part that clung onto old loves. I had too many memories of ex-girlfriends, ex-sweethearts, ex-whatevers lingering around my place to nobody’s benefit. I had boxes and cameras and phones full of love letters, toys, gifts and photos of them since I was eighteen, and they were everywhere in my home, and they were as haunted as you could get — my ex-lovers’ beautiful, nude spirits would come out of them at night, laughing at me like maniacs, reminding me that they will never, ever give me a BJ again.
I decided to get rid of my memories the worst way possible: I planned to look at every single photo, love letter, toy and gift before stacking them all in the middle of the road, smothering them with Coolabah and then burning them for good. The experience was just like watching all Star Wars movies in one sitting: it took a shitload of time; sometimes I’d laugh, sometimes I’d cry, sometimes I’d be aroused, sometimes I’d yell in anger, sometimes I’d be stricken with wonder, sometimes I’d fall asleep, sometimes I’d pray and ask the Lord for forgiveness, and at the end of it all I wondered what the point of any of it was.
Eva, who was the reason I started this blog in the first place and who took up a whole portion of my book, was the hardest to let go of. Letting go of every memory I had of her was like using a butter knife to cut off a piece of my soul. No matter how negatively I tried to remember her, I could never trick myself into believing she wasn’t beautiful. She was depressingly beautiful. I had boxes of emails and photos and gifts from her, and like a sadist I looked over everything one by one before placing it all in a trash pile.
After the long uphill climb of letting go of Eva, everything else was a downhill stumble — there was Ariel, Carol, Cassy, Therese, Charlotte, Annabelle, Anna, the receptionist, Natasha, Candy, Hannah, Hayley, Jamie, Janine, Madison, Rachel, and so on, and so on, and so on, and at one point all these women merged together, to my great fright, to become a thirty-foot-tall Beyonce-looking woman who simply glared at me. She told me that I was a degenerate and screamed at me to stop what I was doing. But I ignored the frightening witch and piled all my memories of these women together, and when I set fire to it all she shrieked, dancing into the atmosphere, vanishing into the world, and I wept to no music in the background, and I realised that one day, when people stop mentioning my name, no one will ever remember anything I have ever done, and I never would have existed, I never would have lived.
I drove North, to Christie’s place. “You look exhausted,” she said.
“I’m fine!” I grunted, and we spent the evening drinking wine.
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