The Folded Clock: A Diary

Chapter 52: August 22

Today my husband and I cleaned out our storage space. It is not news that we have mice. These mice have feasted on expensive baby clothing that no baby has ever worn; they have crapped on my first wedding album. These mice are opinionated in all the right ways — Why designer kimonos for an infant! Why the marriage to that unsuitable man! — and still we must kill them. First we must embargo their bedding supply. We swept and boxed and taped and stacked. These tasks always take longer than they should; while killing is the order of the day, it is impossible to fully extinguish one’s curiosity about one’s own shat-upon past.

Old pictures confirmed to me that I wore glasses that did not suit my former face. What I found most disconcerting about my old (i.e., younger) face, however, is that it suggests I might have become a different person from the one I am. That face wore a lot of vintage men’s outdoor gear. In general I look like I live in a place where it is always cold and about to rain, a place where fashion is a prophylactic against the elements and one’s body is never revealed until the moment of intercourse, if then. I should have been the wife of a dogsled musher (I was dating one at the time); I should have watched birds or studied lichen; my body and my face should have grown bigger and bigger, rather than shrinking, rather than appearing, as my body and face now appear, as though I’m a practicing self-cannibal. The point at which that person shifted trajectories to become this person was not photographed or documented in the evidence boxes. Where or how she happened could not be ascertained.

I also found a file folder of short stories I’d written in my twenties. I had the same reaction to these stories as I did to the photos of my old face. I didn’t immediately recognize the stories as mine. I had no memory of ever writing them. I thought they were copies of stories written by friends that I’d, for whatever reason, kept. But each fictional scenario closely resembled a real-life scenario from my twenties. One story was about a woman going to Alaska over Thanksgiving with a boyfriend she didn’t love named Tom (I’d been to Alaska over Thanksgiving with a boyfriend I didn’t love named Jim). One was about a woman playing craps in Reno with her husband (I’d played craps in Reno with my boyfriend). Also, the file was labeled “Stories in Progress.” All signs pointed to the fact that these stories were written by me. But I had no memory of writing them. “In Progress” would seem to imply “failed” if the in-progress-ness has extended, without progress, over a twenty-year period. The struggle to make a story that’s inherently shitty into a story that’s inherently not, well, often the only good story to come from such a struggle is the story of the struggle itself. Yet I didn’t remember the struggles I’d had with the stories in this folder. I didn’t remember trying to fix these shitty stories in the loft I rented with my beautiful friend nicknamed the “Queen of Soho” and the Hollywood actor who wished instead to be a concert pianist. I remembered the actor’s noisy espresso making and piano playing, but I did not remember trying to fix these shitty stories. I remembered the Queen’s heavy footfalls and her incessant fax receiving, but I did not recall them as distractions from trying to fix these shitty stories. I remember weighing my hunger against the shattered concentration that would come from taking the scary freight elevator downstairs, and walking alongside the Holland Tunnel traffic, and buying a bagel from the corner store run by curt men from Beirut, but I did not remember doing so in service of fixing these shitty stories. I don’t have an exact equation by which to estimate the time it took for me to fail for the thickness of this file folder, but a decent guess would be years. Which means I did not remember years of failing to write a decent story, which is what I most wanted to do at the time. How could I possibly forget this?