Let me tell you now what you already know: someday, soon, all of this will go.
The relics that catch the light will leave you, lifting you through the sweetest parts of your story one last time. And you’ll part with the pieces that seem possessed: slipping off their bitterness like a smokey snakeskin. Yes, these objects may technically come to outlive your body in their material form. But it is your form and your feeling that gives them their reason to live, for however long you both shall lay your hands on one another.
So start by re-becoming the artist of your own archaeology. Gather the most painful objects. Take them out on the town or into a yard and roll out a blanket beneath them. Behold the ache and the acridness of these items. And then look those lockboxes straight in the eye and speak with them directly. Tell them what they’re permitted to hold and what they will not hold any longer. Speak to them in a new accent than the one they heard over so many years of soaking up suffering. Handle them firmly and repossess their residue in your own two hands.
You can also explore renovating their accumulated energy. If a kitchen pot was actually affiliated with memories of hunger and want, fill it with fresh fruit and feed from it whenever the reds are ripest. If no love at all seemed to ever live in a gift you were given, gift it to the person in your life for whom your love pours over without limit.
Burn and break some things if you absolutely must. But remember, above all, that healing is not a sorting out of want and don’t want. It is not even a liberation from our ballast. No, my dear. It is the full possession of whatever appears to possess us. The living with the weight of our life in its entirety. And when you’re brave enough to fill your pockets with every shred of sentiment you possess, your body will learn that the bricks of this so-called ballast can bring you down to the ground but they cannot bury you. Instead, they will settle you into your seat on this earth that has always been yours.
So instead of exiling these relics to the back of the basement, or trying to break them in half —which, I suspect, will only threaten to break you, too—choose to swallow them whole. Make them so much a part of your matter that they cannot help but shift their cells and transform from separate pieces of suffering into the wholeness of your whole history. Use every last drop in the perfume vials that feel like cursed poisons. Erode the metal of the vessels that harbor your pain by serving from them every single day.
These are your treasures. Every last one of them. From the dolce to the amaro and back again. Wear them down. And wear them well.
Un abbraccio forte,
Otea
