Object impermanence

I’m still here. I hope you are, too.

When I was about 9 or 10 or maybe 8, I can’t recall, it has been a long time.... I was obsessed with chess, like The Queens Gambit obsessed... I borrowed a book about chess from the local library on Lexington and University in St Paul. It’s not there any more, I don’t know... it’s probably a restaurant or something... 

That’s not really the point, other than if I’m not there directing change, change never happens for the better. That’s how important I am 😁😁😁

The point is I let the due date slip by, then I hid the book because I wanted to believe I had lost it instead of really wanting to keep it and read it over and over and over to get really good at chess. Really good at something. Then it got too late to actually return it and I had forgotten where I hid it. Life moved on, the St Paul Public Library gave up trying to extract the book of the replacement money from me. Maybe they closed and just lost track of me. 

Ten or so years later, my parents lost their only house they could afford to a foreclosure and I returned to my old room to clear out what little of my childhood I wanted to keep. That room had become my younger sister’s room when I ... escaped... at seventeen. I’m not sure what would have been left that was mine, but the exercise seemed to be important to my mom. 

I found the book I had hid in my little private space I created in the closet between the walls. I had long forgotten about that “closet,” but it was a bit of a time capsule of what I held so close to my heart when I was young, the small objects of my youth I was deathly afraid others would take from me, those things that would leave me incomplete, despondent and perhaps a bit... suicidal ... if I had to live without them.

So... I’m still here. I hope you are, too.