Sunday, 24 March 2002 | Past

I woke up early this morning feeling miserable, so for the first half of the day, I did very little beyond watch the beautiful weather—through glass and screens—age and eventually fade, without me in it. For the second half of my day, feeling a little better, I sifted through haphazard papers that have stubbornly accumulated and formed intimidating mounds around my room. It was something I'd been dreading, but, once I started making sense of it, I enjoyed feeling my procrastination-anxiety unravel and finding evidence of my life prior to today.

I came across old song lists for mixed tapes I'd made; a note from Ingo from one of my first days in Berlin, detailing the best way for me to get to a certain part of town; pieces from the Berlin Wall that Ingo, Wolfgang, and I chipped off an abandoned slat, as we crouched in the woods by the edge of a road; pages of tiny notebooks on which I'd written restaurant food specials of evenings long ago, back when I spent my energy as a waitress; a list of inside jokes that an old friend and I accrued at the beach ten years ago, half of which I could no longer understand.

I put it all into one big heap on the floor, sat Indian-style in the center of it, and formed several more coherent piles, mentally labeled for their destination. By now, everything has been organized and relocated in deliberate drawers and shelves and closets. My head, however, is still attached to fragments that I unearthed today, and it doesn't seem able to catch up to the present.