“So you don’t think it’s creepy.”
“I don’t think it’s creepy, no. I think you’re probably just reading too much into it.”
“So he’s not actually a murderer?”
“Oh, no, he’s definitely a murderer. I thought we already established that.”
“Shut up.” I threw my arm out to punch her, but she was too fast for me; she danced away, laughing at her own joke.
I read Aunt Helen’s next letter that afternoon.
Dear Lottie,
It’s strange to think that already, in so little time, so much has changed. When you read this, all my things will have been auctioned off to the highest bidder. My houses will be gone, my cars and my books (Abe better be taking good care of them), my flowers and my flowerpots, my clothes and my shoes and my jewelry (I hope you’re wearing it, Lottie, because jewelry is meant to be worn). This bothered me at first, knowing that everything I have collected over the course of my lifetime will suddenly be, quite unceremoniously, not mine. I wondered: Am I materialistic? If I am, is it okay to be? Is everyone? Is it a problem, liking our stuff?
I don’t think I have a good answer to this.
I think certainly, as privileged citizens of this world, as people who can afford a few material possessions, there is a tendency to then go overboard and fill up our lives with THINGS. And then, maybe even sillier, we become attached to them! Me! A woman lucky enough to have many friends and a beautiful family and a nephew and a niece I adore! I am attached to my THINGS, Lottie, everyTHING from a painting purchased in Spain to a little wire basket picked up at the local Goodwill. There is no rhyme orreason to this madness! $2 or $2,000, I am equally attached!
Anyway, here’s a little exercise I made myself do recently, just to break that initial attachment: I took something I thought I could not live without, and I gave it away.
I think you should do the same. You might find it rather freeing, as I did (after I got over myself and stopped hyperventilating).
Give something away. Leave it for someone else. The where, the what: those are up to you.
Many times in our lives we may be forced to part with things we really do not wish to part with (a friend, one’s healthy cells, etc.).
Consider this a small practice.
Just pick something, and let it go.
Love, H.
My offering to the universe, or at least to Aunt Helen’s ghost (Did I believe in ghosts? Undecided.), turned out to be a thing I’d been thinking about more and more. A thing I had never showed anyone. A thing I had held on to for years, kept it in between my box spring and mattress, not able to throw it away, not able to look at it, not able to do anything except leave it alone.
This seemed like the perfect fate for it. It was something I didn’t need anymore. It was something I should have letgo of a long time ago.
I pulled it out now and let it rest on my comforter while I stared at it.
It was innocuous enough at first glance: a small notebook with tiny gazelles on the cover. When I picked it up, I imagined it weighed much more than it actually did. Every page was absolutely covered with words written in thick black ink. Words I wrote when I couldn’t sleep. Years’ worth of restlessness, an attempt to write the negative, worrisome thoughts out of my head. I scanned it now, a heavy feeling growing in the pit of my stomach: scared, body, death, broken, tired, drowning, broken, pieces.
I knew fighting the rising symptoms of anxiety wasn’t as easy as throwing a little notebook away, but it couldn’t have been good to sleep on this thing, this weight, this darkness, night after night after night. It couldn’t have been good to hold on to a thing that was such a distinct reminder of all those thoughts that lingered in the back of my mind, growing and growing as I did my best to pretend not to notice.
For some reason I didn’t quite understand, I got a roll of wrapping paper out from under my bed and measured out a square big enough to wrap the notebook up. I didn’t yet know where I was going to leave it, but the distinct cover, those gold-foil gazelles, was making me sick.
My dad walked in as I was taping the last flap of the wrapping shut. The notebook was covered in very cheerywrapping paper. I felt hot and uneasy.
“Wait,” he said, seeing the package. “Whose birthday is it? Did I forget someone’s birthday?”
“It’s nobody’s birthday. It’s just something Aunt Helen wanted me to do. One of her things.”
“Hmm,” he said, sitting on the bed.
“What do you mean,hmm?”
“You know you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do, right? It wouldn’t be unlike my sister to ask too much of you. She tended not to think of what effect her actions might have on other people. She might have you doing things for her for the rest of your life.”
I knew what he meant. Aunt Helen had called herself selfish in one of her letters, had expressed a hope that she’d grown out of it, but it wasn’t really that simple to explain. It was more complicated; it wasn’t selfishness so much as it was an inability to understand how someone could not be available to her every whim.
