I mean to go there daily. It's on the list. Every list, every day.
And most days I find a reason to avoid it...
The locker, it's not just a locker, it's a portal into my unconscious, a metaphor for my every disordered and dangling thought, 10,000 unfinished projects, unsorted arts and crafts, nick-knacks and memorabilia. To the casual eye it's all just junk, but like all enchantments nothing is as it seems...
Mnemosyne, Hades, I'm Orpheus, again and again returning to the cave, excavating paths, deadfall traps poised overhead, toppling boxes apprehended mid-flight by other boxes, cardboard arches filled with crockery, paint brushes, oils, watercolors, acrylics, pastels, mixed media...
Unpacking memories, Eurydice, Eurydice, it's all memory, old photographs, letters, inaccessible memories stored in jumbles of towering boxes, a labyrinth of boxes splitting their sides, buckets running with sand, concentrates, bones and skeletons, chests of drawers and trunks and more chests, crates filled to the brim, ledgers, diaries of expenses, of trivial events, notebooks and sketches, boxes of books, remembered and forgotten, I need to unspool a ball of twine that I might find my way out again, through the overhanging shade, and tantalizing, always out of reach or at the bottom of some great stack or pyramid, another box, another crate, dig deeper, ever deeper...
There are CD's, boxes of CD's, CD ROMS, DVD's filled with music, .jpg's, .gif's, .mp3's and .mp4's, files, pictures, forgotten, lost, corrupted, in unreadable formats, on broken laptops, cameras, tablets, cellphones, flash drives and memory cards, SD, Micro SD, plastic shards of memory filled with copper teeth, unrecoverable, now a decade since last I opened, Vaults and Cupboards full of childhood toys, suitcases and closets full of discarded clothing, a box of stopped watches, shelves filled with old postcards, memberships and passports (and the daughter, assisting, recognizes not me but her brother), like Theseus and the Minotaur, unraveling, unpacking, ever deeper and deeper into the gloom, blind and searching, remembering, ...
Fill the car with boxes, don't check, don't look inside, they can be returned, there will be many trips back here, this place warrants a thousand excavations, sort through, file, discard, transcribe, sell, the work here, years to organize it all...
Life now is measured more by what I've forgotten than what I can remember, I had forgotten but now I remember in this intangible shade, this cave of shadows, of shifting umbras, the photographs of ghosts and music-box hauntings, while all the while digging deeper and deeper, this is where the treasures are. this: in the tomb of all ideas, ideals, I'm my own grave robber ...