Losing 29 lbs

I lost 29 lbs last night that I didn’t even know I had. I’m not sure how else to phrase it at this point. This isn’t a medical story but one of culture and society and perhaps generations.

My mother sent me a large suitcase full of “stuff”. The generalization was irritating me before I even pulled the zipper and I honestly had no idea what to expect. The suitcase weighed about thirty pounds but I only claimed one of those for myself. It was filled with me essentially. Report cards, certificates, diplomas, the extremely rare photos of my youth and other odds and ends; 30 lbs of mostly paper.

I stared into the abyss of my past because honestly I don’t feel like it was me. So much of it doesn’t feel like me that it was almost dreadful. I keep very few mementos of my past and never anything I might view as “transitory” like report cards. That’s kind of how I view everything, though. Everything is transitory once the context has passed.

I keep things that have to do with my grandfather and there were two pictures with him in there. My high school diploma probably took up half of the remaining weight being in a little leather case but that felt like something I should keep. I don’t have my college diploma so I’m not sure why the high school one means anything to me.

The fair haired child in the photos isn’t me; it hasn’t been me for a long time. I am not sure why they sent me these things. Are my parents admitting that the child in this suitcase is gone for them as well? Is this an act of them facing their own impending mortality or a way for them to try and reconnect to me? We haven’t truly seen each other in over a decade. Maybe they want to see if the child in the suitcase is still out there.

I don’t really know. I have to be self-aware of the fact that I don’t form connections with people in the same way most do. I don’t have a solid sense of the passage of time and I can’t remember when things happened. I constantly misplace when I met or interacted with people so I tend not to keep in contact with anyone once their context has passed. Sometimes I remember doing something with my college roommate but it actually happened in high school before I had ever met him.

It reminds me that I constantly feel like I am going about life incorrectly. These things everyone else seems to want to do: taking photos, collecting physical manifestations of memories and keeping things. I just don’t keep things. The context is personally bound and honestly solved in so many cases. What good are report cards from 30 years ago? What good is this certificate proclaiming the dedication of 50 hours community service to a cause? Society makes me feel like I am supposed to care about things that I simply don’t have the capacity to.

So I left behind 29 lbs of myself and I can’t tell if I’m crying because I feel like I am supposed to be sad or if it really did matter.