The Time You Spend Looking For Your Rose

I’ve misplaced some old letters, and I wanted to review them for my writing project. I was sure I knew where I had kept them – a special box, marked and everything – and my house is not so very large. The letters are all from friends to me, during the year I am trying to write up. It’s very long ago, and I need all the spurs to my memory I can get.

I had always meant to come back to them, and cherished them without wanting to open up the box; the project is a memoir of the year after I graduated college, and my life was drastically different in that year. It was also full of changes and surprises for most of my friends, especially those who had also graduated. The very range of those adventures has always seemed to me an important story. I did a year of volunteer work in a small community; and my outer life felt to me constrained and compacted beyond anything I had anticipated. Other friends’ lives seemed to blow open or to take on wild new contours.

And now I can’t find my letters to clarify the stories.

I am already dragging my heels badly on this project. As a scholar friend urges me, my task at this point is just to get it written – you can’t edit or correct something until it exists. But it is harder than I had expected to establish the necessary routine. I keep hoping to find some set-up that will echo my piano practice, where I can show up, perform some minimal discipline, and gradually develop a habit. I have gotten ever so much excellent advice about it.

But now I have this lovely new obstacle, which is the disappearance of The Letters. They are a very logical, long-cherished part of this project. I suppose for all the decades I’ve kept them, I’ve been meaning to get around to this writing. I’ve moved the box repeatedly.

Can I have thrown it away? This is possible: it is within my imagination, which confuses itself with memory far too often. I can picture a kind of purgative fury, in which I decided that it was presumptuous of me to treat these other stories as my own property, and somehow liberating to cast them all off into oblivion. I am capable of that kind of an impulse.

Now I don’t know what to think, and I have very few places left to look. Clearly I must stop waiting to find them before I write anything further. It won’t do. Perversely – that is, naturally enough – The Letters have begun to haunt me. It is over 40 years I have kept them around, ignoring them at my elbow. And now, they matter. The harder I look for them, the more they matter. If I find them, I’m quite capable of giving them a casual glance-over and shrugging them aside.

For now, they seem like a Rosetta Stone to my whole history.