Dear cousin Mike:

Thank you so much for the nervous breakdown you gave me last night. Which then led to illumination.

I really needed it.

Love,
cousin Sheila

It all began a month ago when I mentioned casually that I haven’t been able to read in a couple of months. I was going okay there for a while, and was halfway through the Nureyev book, when suddenly I put it down in February and have been unable to pick up anything since. I’m kind of upset about it, but I can’t force myself to read. There’s also so much else going on. I am able to read my own work (thank God), and there’s been lots of activity in THAT area, so at least I’ve had some intellectual stimulation, even though it’s only from myself.

One of the things about my cousin Mike is that you can’t say anything to him without him immediately providing a possible solution. Even if that’s not what you’re looking for. Seriously, don’t share anything if you don’t want a solution.

“I’ve lost 20 pounds, but I need to kick up my weight loss program.”
“Here’s a colon cleanse. Do it now.”

“I’m bored. I have nothing to do.”
“Write me something. Here are the parameters. GO.”

“I’m so in love, I can’t concentrate!”
“Go carve ‘Sheila Hearts So-and-So’ on a tree in Central Park and then get back to work.”

“Gosh, my hands are cold.”
“Let me Fed-Ex you some mittens.”

You have to be careful what you tell him!

So when I mentioned that I haven’t been able to read, Mike’s noggin went click-click-click, and three days later I come home to an Amazon package at my door. I was confused. Had I ordered something? I opened it. It looked like a catalog for a museum show. There was a note from Mike included: “This’ll get you reading again. Love, Mike.” He is off the charts, isn’t he?

I sat down and flipped through the book. It is called Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry. It’s written (although to just say it is “written” is not correct – it’s really stage-managed, art-directed, conceived) by Leanne Shapton. I got the jist of it as I flipped through it, and at first I thought it was real – but then Mike told me that no, it’s all a performance art piece.

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I didn’t read it right away. I put it down. But last night, feeling a bit of that old melancholy approaching like the shadow from a cloud, I picked it up.

An hour later I put it down, and lay in bed, with tears rolling down my face. Hope tiptoed around me, concerned, purring.

Basically, what Shapton has done – is create a relationship between two people (and we see their photographs throughout the book, they are real people – only this is all a trompe l’oeil, they’ve been hired to embody these main characters) – which has crashed and burned after a couple of years, and the conceit of the book is that all of their shared possessions and photographs (and the memories therein) are now being held for auction, and the book is the auction catalog. “Lot 1001, Lot 1036” – and we see the photographs of the items, and we get a brief description.

There isn’t any editorializing in this format, because of course why would there be? It’s a catalog. But you don’t need editorializing (“he loved her so much, she loved him so much”) because it’s all there, in the items. An entire relationship. How it started, how it blossomed, the turns it took …

And since you know, from the beginning, that these are “artifacts” of a relationship that is now dead, each item is suffused with nostalgia, pain … because sadness bleeds backwards. You wish it wouldn’t but it just seems to work that way. It colors everything, even the joy. You look back on a happy beginning, and your heart aches because you know it won’t last, and all you can see are the tough times that are ahead of you. But, we had so much hope back then! But, we loved each other so much! What happened? How could it just … end??

And sometimes it is not just the relationship ending that you mourn. It is all the STUFF, all the THINGS you have accumulated as a couple … each one with a memory, something important attached to it… your relationship is IN the “things”.

I have a piece of beach glass, no bigger than a baby tooth … a relic from a great love I had, so far the greatest love (see how I say “so far”? I live in hope) … and there have been times when I have been so paranoid about losing that stupid piece of beach glass that I have actually carried it on my person. I have moved past that, thank God, and now it sits in a little china bowl I have on my dresser – with the rest of my beach glass collection – buried in other glass, just part of a larger whole … not called out or highlighted in any way. He knew I collected beach glass, so he gave it to me. All of my beach glass is OCEAN beach glass, but this was from Lake Michigan, so he thought it would be good to add some variety to the collection. Everything else is salt water, which is me – the girl from the Ocean State. But there’s one piece in there that is freshwater beach glass, from the man who grew up in the Midwest. It is the smallest piece of beach glass I have, barely a chip, and now I know I would be fine if I “lost” it, but still. It’s there. A relic. An artifact. Of the swoon I had for this man, this great love in my past.

If I were to put together a catalog of my love affair with that man, there wouldn’t be much to sell. A Swatch. Some letters. A cartoon he drew of him and me. A refrigerator magnet. And a tiny chip of freshwater beach glass. But again: the SIZE of the love is not reflected in the amount of STUFF accumulated.

Leanne Shapton’s beautiful book calls to mind all of those memories, all of those thoughts. It’s hypnotic. You stop thinking, “Wow, this is such a clever idea” on around page 3, and you just enter the story. You watch these two people meet, pursue each other, fall in love, meet each other’s families … all through their objects, mind you … and then, slowly, again like the shadow from a cloud, you start to watch it break down. It is impossible to read this little volume and not think about your own life and loves and losses. And what each relationship would “leave behind” in terms of artifacts … what you would put on the auction block for each one, and what you would declare as its value. The chip of beach glass is priceless. I’m just saying.

It’s actually a very confronting book.

Damn her.

And damn you, Mike.

Back in the dark ages of my life, I had a first boyfriend. I had had a couple of trial runs in high school and college, but then – at age 20, 21, “he” came along. I had actually known him for about 4 or 5 years at that point, we were good friends, and suddenly, one summer, hmmm, we were hanging out all the time, and hmmmm, we spent our days off together, and hmmm, is he pursuing me??

Yes, he was! We fell in love and that was that for the next four years. My first boyfriend. When that thing crashed and burned, man, it crashed and burned. Unbelievably, we are still good friends. But that took some doing. It took years. We were unable to have any contact for YEARS.

In my recent scanning frenzy, which was what I did in lieu of reading, and it was also my way to let in memories without having them kill me – I came across a lot of old photos of us. It was good to look at them. I posted some of them here, and beautifully – he was looking at them, too – and even commenting. So the sorrow doesn’t bleed backward forever. It may take years, but what I am eventually left with – is the joy. And that, to me, is a miracle. It hasn’t happened with all of the old loves, but it’s happened with a couple of them, and I am strangely grateful. Also proud. I don’t think it’s an accident that these men who loved me once still want to be connected to me. I know that I have something to do with it. Not everything, of course, but something. I am aware that it speaks well of me, and I try to feel good about that. You know, small miracles.

Some of the scanned photos I hadn’t looked at in years. And I was in a place in January where I could really look, where I could really let my mind go back, in a way that wouldn’t shatter my present-day moment. It was incredible for me. The best possible way to handle the maelstrom I was in.

For example, he was there to share triumphs with me. Proud and beaming and at my side.

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In the photo below, we are at the beach, the summer we started dating. This photo was taken the day after I lost my …… something. Hmmm … where did it go, I wonder?

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The following photo is one that would have caused me psychic agony way back when, in the aftermath. Because it so captures our love, and who we really were to each other. It still touches me now, to look at it. Not that I carry a torch, oh my God, no, but … to acknowledge that it happened, it was good that it happened, it wasn’t a mistake, the relationship wasn’t a mistake … we loved each other to death. Out of all of the photos I have of us as a couple, this is the one that captures US.

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And now I can look at it with no pain. As a matter of fact, it makes me smile. That was real. It happened. The sorrow that came later has washed back with the tide. The psychotic break involving the broken-down van in Los Angeles is now a funny story, something to revel in, share. It’s a good story. It has turned into narrative.

Leanne Shapton’s book made me think about all of this.

The other thing it made me think about is all of the artifacts I no longer have. When we broke up, I had a hatbox overflowing with our artifacts. We spent the first year of our relationship in a long-distance situation, because he was in law school in Philadelphia. There was no email. Or, Al Gore was probably using email, and busy inventing the Internet, but WE didn’t have email. So we wrote letters in long-hand. Long long love letters. Pages long sometimes. Filling each other in on our week, but also just talking about how much we missed each other, and how great it would be to see each other on spring break, or whatever. There were other things in that hatbox. Fortunes from fortune cookies that seemed prophetic. Photos. Pressed flowers. Playbills and theatre tickets. Movie stubs. Our entire relationship was in that hatbox. When we broke up, it became far too painful to look through that stuff (where did it go?? How could THAT have ended?), but I couldn’t get rid of any of it.

I moved to Chicago with zero possessions. All I brought with me was a suitcase of clothes and that hatbox. I am not exaggerating. I lived in my first apartment, with my cat Sammy, and my life began in Chicago, and I was dating people, and having the best time of my life, careening through the midnight streets of the Windy City. I had bad moments when I missed that old boyfriend. We had stayed in contact at first – and it became a strange issue with timing.

My friend Brooke had said to me, as a warning, “You’re gonna be sad first – and he’s gonna seem fine. That’s going to hurt. But then, look out, as you start to recover, he’s gonna start to get sad.” She was right. It’s not that me doing better made him feel sad and he wanted me to keep being sad – no, I will not assign a petty motive to someone else’s emotional experience. It was that we were on different timelines, perhaps men and women in general are … that’s just the way it goes … and it happened just like she said. It was like rolling waves coming in. I was sad, I started to get better, then he got sad, and it went that way, undulating, for a while.

I was in Woodland Hills, California, in the immediate aftermath of our breakup, losing my mind, in an utter and complete panic about what had happened. And he was fine. He was dating lots of people, and he actually seemed relieved to be out of our relationship – which absolutely crushed me, yet because Brooke (my more worldly experienced friend) had warned me ahead of time that that would probably be the case, I wasn’t surprised. Then, when I landed on my feet in Chicago, and promptly began making out with every man in a 5-mile radius, my old boyfriend started breaking down. It started hitting him what had happened, that this was really OVER, and I would get these terrible voice mail messages from him, where he didn’t even sound like himself. And I was in a whole new world, with hickeys on my neck, and showing up at my temp job in the same clothes from the day before, and now it was me who didn’t relate.

It was all going according to plan.

Maybe a year later, I was starting to fall in love with someone else (beach glass man) and suddenly that hatbox full of relics started haunting me. But not in the way it used to haunt me. I started to look at it like, “Why am I keeping all of that crap? Is it holding me back?”

And then one day, I will never forget it, I sat down on my floor and went through the whole thing. Piece by piece. I read all the letters. I looked at all the Playbills. I picked up all the movie stubs. I sobbed from beginning to end, tears streaming off my face in an Alice in Wonderland manner. Then something snapped, and I picked up the whole hat box, walked down the back stairwell into the alley below, over to the dumpster, threw the entire thing in – not saving ONE PIECE – and walked back upstairs, still sobbing. I cried and cried and part of me kept thinking, “It’s still down there … I can still go retrieve it if I want …” The call to go get that hatbox was so strong that I left the house and went to a movie. I had to white-knuckle the rest of the day (and night, I might add) … until the next morning, when I knew … the trash had been picked up. It was gone. It was gone. I felt panic, on some level. Like: what have I done??? I so wanted to have that hatbox back.

I actually wish I had it now. Not because I am holding on, but because I am older now, and I have come to love my artifacts (beach glass) and it’s okay to have them around. I can incorporate them into my life now. My past is a PART of me, and whatever man comes into my life now will obviously have to deal with that, we’re not kids anymore, we’re not struggling to define ourselves … we’re adults. A piece of beach glass given to me 15 years ago won’t threaten anything now. But back then I didn’t know that. That hatbox was holding me back. If I was going to fall in love again, I needed to have it be GONE.

As a writer, these artifacts and relics have become precious to me. Much of writing is like acting, or a sense-memory exercise, where you can re-enter your own past with precision. Stuff like old journals and letters can really help jumpstart the process if you need it.

But I will not scorn my younger self who needed to throw away those artifacts. She knew what she was doing, in that moment, and if I regret the loss now, that’s just part of life. Again, loss is to be incorporated with the present-day. There is no other way. If you buck against loss, if you resent it, if you wish that it didn’t happen or that if it didn’t have to be … then you are in some way an undeveloped personality. I have that in me, I know that. I have that tantrum-toddler inside of me that screams, “WHY DOES IT HAVE TO BE THIS WAY?” But as an adult, if you LIVE in that place, if that is primarily where you operate from, then you are still a child. Not only that, but you are closed to possibility, to future … and you also steel yourself for the next disappointment. You are only aware of the possibility that all things will end … even at the hopeful beginning.

That way danger lies.

I am nothing if I cannot hope for things. I am nothing if I cannot succumb, yet again, to the pull of love. I will be truly lost if I give that up. If I let my toddler tantrum shove her way to the forefront.

An interesting coda to all of this:

About 4 years ago, I came home to a package at my door.

No, it was not Mike sending me mittens.

The package was addressed to me in handwriting I know so well that if I came across it in freakin’ Kazakhstan, I would know that my old boyfriend was in the vicinity. We don’t send each other things, so it was all very curious. I opened it, and a small leather-bound book fell out. It was a small journal that we (my first boyfriend and myself) must have bought at a flea market – it had a lock on it, and it was embossed with the words “Lest We Forget” – and we filled it with all of our private jokes as a couple. I have no memory of buying that book. I have no memory of the book itself. Some of the jokes in the book are completely forgotten by me – but some just blazed off the page, as funny as they were the day we decided to write it down. I read the book from cover to cover – with entries in his handwriting, entries in mine – and laughed so hard and so loud that I am shocked the police were not called. I was DYING.

I am usually the one with the good memory. My friends know this about me so they come to me with questions about their own lives. “Who was I dating again in the spring of 1993?” “Uhm, let me think … my hair was short at that time, I was a receptionist, so that means you were dating the Xerox repair salesman from the South side.” “Thank you.” So it’s always shocking to me when someone remembers something I don’t. (A recent example). I love it when that happens. It’s like fragments of my own life are handed back to me on a platter, and I wonder what else I have forgotten. What else is out there?

My first boyfriend sending me the “Lest We Forget” book was handing me back huge fragments from my life that I had forgotten – and perhaps would NOT have forgotten if I hadn’t thrown out that hatbox. (But again, no regrets. We do what we need to do in the moment we need to do it. Let’s move on.) Enormous landscapes of humor and activities and vacations we had and things we loved came back to me – fully formed. It was one of the best surprise gifts ever.

Now of course, we have email, so we spent the next couple of days HOWLING with laughter over email over all of these old jokes, now 20 something years in the past. Truly extraordinary.

An artifact.

On the auction block.

Lest we forget.

Last night, feeling the familiar melancholy approach, the neediness, the anticipation of disappointment that always comes for me at such times … I picked up Mike’s gift.

I lay in bed, with Hope curled around my head, and started reading.

How could Mike know? How could he know, from across the country, what I needed? And unlike someone who sends a gift of, say, a self-help book, something with a title like: Women Who Love Beach Glass and The Men Who Let Them or Hitachi Withdrawal in 12 Steps: A Daybook or Learn To Pretend There’s More Than Love That Matters (and Get a Cat, too) … he sends me a book that is an auction catalog, something completely contrived and created by Leanne Shapton – an amazingly innovative person – detailing the beginning middle and end of a relationship through the objects accumulated.

How to fall in love again knowing that everything you accumulate, with excitement and joy in the present moment, could one day be on the auction block? How do we do that?

It is the human condition.

I don’t know HOW to do that, but I know I MUST do that.

The morning is grey, but I no longer feel melancholy. Leanne Shapton’s riveting book has infiltrated itself into my life already, re-arranging the set pieces, and making me see that no, I have no choice. Not only will I move forward, but I will also – come hell or high water – make art out of it. Whichever way it goes.

Thanks, Mike.

And damn you.

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17 Responses to Dear cousin Mike:

  1. Kerry says:

    Good men, those O’Malleys.

  2. red says:

    To a man.

    The women ain’t so bad either!

  3. Ceci says:

    Wow, Sheila… I needed to read one of your long pieces, written from the heart. I have been in a strange melancholy funk these last days, but this post, in some unexplainable (for me, at least!) way, has helped me. Thank you for sharing, and I am so glad you could open a book again and read it to the end!! I am delighted for you!

    And also: your cousin Mike is out of this world.

  4. lynD says:

    Adorable. You have the most adorabe family (and I include you).

    “So the sorrow doesn’t bleed backward forever.” I really needed to see that this morning.

    LD

  5. De says:

    Wow…seriously, Sheila, you have a wonderful family.
    I have four sisters and they are all so self-involved and barely aware of anyone else around them.

    I know you appreciate your people, though. So you don’t need ME to tell you how awesome they are!

  6. David says:

    You’ve outdone yourself…again. Our friendship is over, your brilliance has dwarfed me, I’m sorry. Maybe I can just be a hanger on for a while. I love Mike, I wish he was my cousin. I love you.

  7. red says:

    David, you know I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that. I too feel that my brilliance has dwarfed you and it is time to move on.

    Sorry. No more rumspringa. I am really beyond it.

    DOH!!!!

    Can’t live without you!!

  8. just1beth says:

    David- Sometimes I pretend Mike is my cousin. And that I am an O’Malley. shhhhhhhhhh- don’t tell anyone.

  9. jenob says:

    Now I want to run out and buy that book, too. If only we all could have a cousin Mike.

    Fortunately, we do have the O’Malleys in general and that helps.

  10. Marisa says:

    I have to go buy that book. And clearly Mike gets you. Which is amazing and beautiful. I love that you have people like that in your family. I have one, my sister – the Person Who Would Pick The Right Book. I also love how he fixes and you know that about him. I am always enthralled by consistent behavior, someone who is always the person you know and expect them to be. In a wonderful and reassuring way. Even when it isn’t what you need – it just keeps the world right… knowing that that is what that person will do. And you can go to them and that is what will happen. I love that.

    And I have a book of my own. My great love that I hope I will someday be eclipsed? We had few artifacts… but fewer photos. So I have a book. Of every photo from years of being together and then years of friendship and then being together again. It only has maybe two dozen pages of images. Carefully affixed with the little photo corners on crisp black sheets. Every photo of him I ever had. A few photos of places. Just places we were together. A business card from a little inn in the middle of nowhere in the mountains of South Carolina. A napkin from a bar. It spans from the beginning of our first three years together to the end of the second time, seven years after we met, when things fell apart. There were times when it hurt just knowing I had it. But now things have changed. We’re the closest of friends. And I’m so glad it’s there.

    And I love reading your words. Sorry I’ve been gone for a while. I hadn’t realized just how much I have missed you.

  11. allison says:

    sheila,
    this is one of my favorite things you have ever written….so evocative, so bittersweet. just beautiful. it inspires me to dig out all those family photographs of complete strangers that i have been buying at flea markets and thrift stores over the years.

    “How to fall in love again knowing that everything you accumulate, with excitement and joy in the present moment, could one day be on the auction block? How do we do that?” This is what I wonder when looking at those haunting black and white photographs of happy families sharing special occasions. How could these people have known that the image they felt so compelled to capture would eventually end up in a ratty cardboard box in a second-hand store where it would be selected by and sold to a curious and sentimental stranger for a dollar decades later?

  12. David says:

    “Hope tiptoed around me, concerned, purring.”

    My favorite line.

  13. tb says:

    Fucking beautiful. Thanks, for real.

  14. sarahk says:

    This is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever read.

  15. red says:

    Hey everyone – thank you thank you for your openness in response. Talking about yourselves, and your own experiences, and just responding truthfully. It really means the world and makes me really glad I wrote it.

    Thanks.

  16. Show up, pay attention, tell the truth, and ….

    Maybe it’s because nothing is normal now … so anything that happens is going to occur to me as important and necessary (“this is exactly what I need!!”), or maybe it’s just because my life has always been a literary…

  17. Fragmentation, Fitzgerald

    I am still not able to read like I used to. I try to just “go with it”, if I feel like reading – but the impulse comes over me intermittently, randomly, and I certainly do not have the…

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