the exchange enducing closure- part two

"It's amazing how, even in a short amount of time, a plethora of items and feelings can be exchanged. From your favorite hooded sweatshirt to the proclamation of eternal love and telling each other your dark secrets."
- Gator

On August 23rd 2004, just before Mindy and I began talking online, I wrote a blog about the process of breaking up. It spoke about the merging between two people and how the artifacts of the relationship conflate together as well. Here's the link if you want to read the post.CLOSURE. But I never felt like the text was complete for some reason. Maybe it's because at the time, I was talking about something in which I had no experience. The context of that blog was relevant to Merci and I breaking up, but Merci and I didn't share too many personal possessions. We lived together for a month and then our relationship ended. The separation process only lasted a few days. We exchanged house keys, a few shirts, a couple of books, and a lot of sad glances.

However Mindy and I had lived together for the last 7 months, sharing our entire lives and possessions (that's what people do when they live together, they try to become this single entity). When we were in Los Angeles, our possessions still had a "mine" and "yours" feeling to them, which neither of us minded. When we moved to San Francisco to start a new life as a unified love, they became "our" possessions. Everything became our bed, our dresser, our toothbrush, our dishes, our bills, our pains, and our experiences. Using the word "my" inside the house became taboo. If I were in "my" chair, Mindy would half jokingly call me out on it. Or if she claimed I couldn't use "her" computer, I felt strangely about that separation.

In the past article I wrote that I thought these trinkets help build the framework of love two people share. I'd like to correct myself on that statement. The possessions have nothing to do with the love two people share. Love is not material. Memories can be stored away in the visual connections of material possessions, but nowhere inside a dresser does love exist. Nowhere inside a sweatshirt does one find true love. It's not the bed that's forcing you to miss your ex-lover's smell. Memories are triggered by the physical stimulus of objects. Emotionally charged memories bridge the connection between the object world and the ethereal world of thought.

Right now, I'm in the process of boxing my things from "her" apartment, to be placed in "my" new residence. I've tried throwing out most I could in terms of possessions. They make me sick with sadness. No, I make me sick with sadness. The material artifacts are excuses my brain uses to confabulate meaning of this situation. The keys I keep with me will soon be her keys. The shower I built in the bathroom will no longer be the place where I bathe. Our home will soon become her temple, as long as she can withstand the blood stains we left behind from the sacrifice of our love.

These are hard realizations for me. However, beyond the possesional aspect of our relationship, what becomes the most difficult, yet most important concept to grasp, is understanding that there were never any possessions from the beginning, ever. Mindy was never "my" wife. I was never "her" husband. The construct of possession is only a construct of the mind. We never own anything or anyone. I wonder even if we own our own thoughts. Maybe they own us. I digress.