The contents of a drawer in my bedroom dresser as of October 1st, 2008:
1. A mix cd from Braxton entitled “And I Said Goddamn, Vol. 1" in his scrawled boyish handwriting, the other volume missing. A mix he made for my sister on Christmas, though all the songs I felt were about me. A mix with songs that always makes me think of winter.
2. An almost empty box of bandages especially for wrapping around joints and knuckles from when I got stitches earlier in the summer.
3. An orange post it note of directions that reads:
Blue line to Belmont,
#82 bus Kimball Homen Northbound,
3301 W Bryn Mawr and Kimball.
I didn’t remember until reading it now what the directions were to, but it was the first bar I went to in Chicago, the Hollywood Tavern. Shane and I got in underage because I offered to carry the band’s equipment in, some all girls punk rock group. Slipped right through the bouncer with a smile and a nod to the drum in my hands. I sat and drank a pitcher of beer because the bartender was unable to make cocktails, gave me whiskey and club soda when I asked for a whiskey sour. The band members turned out to be lesbians who lit my cigarettes and bought me drinks. I stumbled home at four in the morning, Shane pissing in some house’s yard on Kimball and laughing all the way home about it. Going to a dive by my apartment for cheeseburgers and fries, passing out in a room that smells of ketchup and grease.
4. A pencil sharpener I’ve never used but kept nonetheless because my father bought one for every member of our family on year for Christmas because he is clueless but we still love him.
5. The following photographs:
One black and white photograph of Megan and I with sunglasses on at the top of the hill on old Broadway you can see all of Peru from, the only place it looks stretched out and majestic, a weaving pattern of streetlights and rows of houses. Where I spent my last night in Peru before moving to Chicago, where I danced to “Last Dance with Mary Jane” on the hood of my car while it snowed, where I sat to watch the fireworks explode and crawl across the sky.
A color picture in Portland, Maine, in front of the ocean with my sister Alison in the middle, my arm around her, and my sister Erin on her other side, smiling, some strange tourist behind the camera, face forgotten. A picture taken when I was punk rock (or when I thought I was), when I was going to be a political journalist, a picture where I barely recognize myself.
One color photograph of my father in our kitchen, caught in a smile, much grayer than I remembered, salt and pepper hair and beard. In his work clothes still, oil on his hands from fixing the wheels of the tractor that cut his middle finger off, scrape on his forehead. The blue eyes he gave to me, the attached earlobes, the inability to truly smile unless caught completely unaware.
Picture of my mother in the living room with a red heart drawn on her cheek for reasons unknown. Glasses on, mouth slightly open like she is about to say something, as she usually is. Wearing the necklace and earrings of gold she has always worn, the ones she loses down the kitchen sink once a year, only to find again. Her hair blonde rather than the red of her youth, the red hair she met my father with, now blonde and grey.
6. A necklace given to me by an ex-boyfriend, a silver chain, white gold and diamonds, banished to the bottom of the drawer. Too nice to throw away, too expensive, but of no use anymore. “It is supposed to mean love forever, an eternity,” he said, and I am now of the belief that such gifts are a curse, a jinx as soon as they are given.
7. A cut out page of GQ magazine of the dead actor Marcello Mastroianni, in an impeccable suit, cigarette to his lips, the man I believe to be the ideal. The man of La Dolce Vita, of standing in the Trevi Fountain in Rome with Anita Ekberg, the man who said, “Slyvia, Sylvia,” and made me wish it was my name he uttered breathlessly. The man I pictured naming a little boy after just so I could say “Marcello,” feel the roll of it off my lips.
8. Sparklers I bought from the side of the road in Indiana from a man whose teeth never stayed in his mouth even when it was closed, always the ends of a few peeking out. Sparklers I bought and never set off because it never felt right, it never felt like a celebration.
9. A round, carved wooden box my parents brought me from Haiti when they went on a mission trip there, the wood the color of cherry. It holds a few loose quarters and a sea shell, but when I look at it I see the cold cement floors of the houses they built there, of the sunburnt white faces next to the dark smiling faces, faces without names because my parents forgot to write on the back of their photographs who everyone was. “Is that Paulo? I can’t remember,” they say, eyes crinkled at the corners.
