It Covers the Hillside

Today is my 40th birthday. And it's been a bit of a rough year. Lots of changes. Some of them sad. And yet, I'm still here to document it all. That's what I do.

Continuing my purge of old paperwork, I found some old letters from a friend I had when I was a freshman in college. I met him in philosophy class. Well, met is a strong word. Observed and admired, then slipped him an anonymous note. We weren't exactly fast friends. But little by little, we bonded over shared love of Herman Hesse and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Fast forward to the end of the school year. I joined the army and he found it hard to process. But, we wrote letters over the summer, then through basic training and AIT and continuing on to Fort Carson. Beautiful letters. But something happened. He was going through stuff. I was going through stuff and it all came apart. At the end, I was trying to hold on and he just wanted to get away. He wrote one last letter. It was blunt. It hurt. And I still have it. I have all the letters. Finding them reminded me of something. A pattern of some kind. I haven't quite been able to formulate what it is. I talked it over with my doctor trying to work it out. And she asked me a simple question: Why did I keep it? That last letter. The other ones, fine. They were nice memories. But that last one, what good did it do me to keep it? And I keep it still. It's history. My history. A document of what has transpired, good or bad.

There might be some greater lesson here. I haven't figured it out yet. Something about my obsessive need to record and catalog and process and reanalyze. Kind of like what I'm doing here. Why do I feel things like these decades-old pieces of paper define me? As I get older, my memory is not what it was. I need something tangible to help with things I don't remember anymore. But hanging on to words, will it get me any closer to the truth, or further away? It may actually be the opposite. Once you write something down, maybe it's less true. Once it's fixed in print, all the flexibility of meaning is gone. Or is it like I used to tell my students, a piece of writing is never done it's just due. Subject to change, in the next edition, constantly being revised, updated...like me.