collect the love that i've been given

I'm attempting to digest everything that I have felt in the past few days.
Emotionally high and middle and low.

It's the strangest feeling when you say goodbye to and old love that you haven't spoken to in months, but you still think of as one of those "life" friends. One of those people that made a dent, that you probably will not forget for a long time if ever. Doing that was like, having an exorcism or something; everything just comes out. Old nicknames, too-long-hugs, tears, books and "remember this", and "that was weird", and "why the fuck did we date." It's exhausting but its good; good to know that we are sort of on the same page, and that its done, our chapter of LA life that ended months ago is actually over.

Moving on is easy enough to do at this point, but how do you balance moving on and just straight up forgetting. I was left with a bag of "parting gifts", thrown together in a drunken haze and given to me. Upon opening this bag only today, it was like a precisely edited bag of our overlapped lives. DVDs of movies we saw in theater, talked about, saw separately, or that I posted on this very blog. A magazine made of newsprint from '06 that inspired me to create my portfolio in newsprint. It's crazy how fittingly curated this last-ditch no-effort bag was. But what do I do with these things?

I asked him, when do you think all of the things we see and find won't remind us of people in our current (and now past) lives? Is it like, 2 years? 5 years? 10 years? Never? I guess its until we have new experiences revolving around these things with other people. I don't know if he had an answer, but its somewhat daunting to have these memories. I love these memories, but for how long will the Klaxons make me think of running down Wilshire Blvd. filming the band with old friends. How long will St. Vincent make me think of sitting in a hot Suzuki in downtown LA sweating my face off but feeling love and joy and that smell of hot air! The same goes for blue Helmut Lang dresses, street posters, photobooths, my kitchen table, Andy Warhol, Michael Pitt, french presses, the MOCA and so many things I think about. These are the people attached to everything in my life.

I've chosen to be sentimental! To keep these things with me, in my head, in my heart, in my sense of smell, in my fingers. And I can't help but stow them away, only for those times when you need to remember. I'll skip St. Vincent on my iTunes to preserve the smell I feel when it comes on. My stacks of photobooth pictures stay in drawers unless I need to remember what he or she looked like. It's preservation, and maybe it's not healthy but its how I roll.