clutter

inspiration: simon wu’s dancing on my own poetics of space notes from book reading DOMO response to victoria chang memory

is nostalgia a blessing or a curse? it’s fitting that the person who asks this is a friend i haven’t seen in four years; that we ponder about this question in literal circles in my hometown grocery store. we’re both in the process of reorganizing the clutter that’s accumulated in our childhood homes.

last month it’s a question i never considered until an old friend asks. we’re walking around a grocery store, the only space for us to roam in walking distance of our brunch spot. it’s july; notably, the first july i’ve spent in my hometown in four years. i’ve resisted every invitation to come back home, but this time it’s an obligation i cannot refuse: it’s time to sell the house, and it’s time to sort through the mess i left behind. let’s go on a walk through memory field. “Whatever you aren’t … is what makes you – a house is useful not because its floorboards or ceilings or walls, but because the empty space between them.” (pilgrim bell, kaveh akbar) a house is alluring because of its potential. my dad itches for pet projects. the basement mancave, our kitchen renovation, he even insisted on replacing our bathroom cupboards himself — it’s endearing how the panels are now installed upside down.

i look out the window where dense shadows of tree press into my vision & sink into the dewy humidity like memory foam.

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0AVZ1OLtOLJbiWvvW0NoZp?si=421c9250d0894e74 last week V asks if i would go to a haunted house. what we didn’t realize is that i was going to one i was all too familiar with.

• suburban unconscious

  • my mom cleans a pool no one uses for the potential i will have a happy lil pool party with classmates who only like me for my utility
  • my dad built a sunroom to collect light

• this house planted into the ground by my parents

  • the impending sale of my childhod home is more emotional to my parents than i , and i am confused. this house’s growth directly parallels mine — homegrown before i was born, i learned to walk and went to summer camp and had my first kiss the same time as we renovated the kitchen and added a sunroom.
  • The growth of the house parallels mine.
  • a child is alluring because of its potential
  • i wonder if my parents saw me as much of a pet project as their house was
    • a father loves his projects. my dad
  • empty vessel ready to be filled

• ive almost assumed a superiority complex to the suburbs, to new jersey, etc

• this house is a shrine to my pandemic angst — some may say a trap — call it incubation — call it cage my mom’s pride & joy is the pear tree in the backyard. every fall she relentlessly tends to it, trimming her leaves, shoving fruit after fruit into my arms to bring to my friends, my teachers, anyone in my life. she’d lug it to the houes across the neighborhood, and come back armful with their own fruits of labor: tomatoes, cucumbers, ku gua.

  • grandma loved this pear tree, she’d recall to no one in particular. in days of laze i’d stare out my bedroom window and imagine a phantom of wai po—who i cannot recall in full corporeality—her arm outstretched for october’s late bloom. the pear tree is a pointer to a false memory, one that i wish i could have but exists in mere fantasia.

• this house explodes with

• i’m a sentimental person. a hoarder of memories and experiences. i rifle through shoeboxes and each item is a pointer to a version of myself i will never be again. each object is animate, (meaning has a soul)

• • for someone so victim to nostalgia, its strange how rare i return to my hometown. maybe it’s because im hyperaware of how the past may destroy me, that i tiptoe around these memories, wary of the unresolved tension in these land mines.
    • “Things are needy. They take up space. They want attention, and they will drive you mad if you let them.” - book of form and emptiness
    • in this book the main character develops a condition where he’s tormented by the voices of the objects around him. in a way, the memories overwhelm me when i am surrounded by my suburban clutter.
    • • maybe the noise keeps me from returning home. growing up it was never silent — there was always the rice cooker whistling a dainty tune, against the quiet rumble of the laundry machine, the mamma mia movie on repeat as ambient noise while my mom cleaned. cacaphony

• i remember when i came back one year and confronted the emptiness left behind the decaying swingset in our backyard. i hadn’t used her in years, yet i had a strange compulsion to curl up into myself. my childhood is dead and i have killed her, i had very very melodramatically declared to myself.

• even writing this, i’m surprised by the grief outpouring from my words.

what is the best shape to contain a memory? i used to think photos & videos are sufficient. maybe even words. these digital notions so transportable and shareable. * there’s so many moment left uncaptured in pictures. * my closet door literally un-hinged, consequence of my neighbor and i playing with my room * birthday cards collected from so many childhood friends who i don’t talk to now * the love letters exchanged w my high school ex’es, muji .38 indelible on notebook paper

• regarding the shape of memory: rather than solid, it’s liquid, taking the form of whatever container it fits within, it escapes precision, its hazy and bleeds in and out of me

  • and thats why the perfect vase are the objects abandoned.

• in the process of emptying out, it’s jarring to see a once pregnant house gutted.

• the process of cleaning up is so sad

  • literally trying to quantify the emotional vaue of an object, whether it’s enough to keep something just to tether yourself to a moment
  • the same wya i hestiate to delete photos, to cut out ppl, to throw out things, there’s the potential it promises — the potential of delivering an emotional experience when i pass by it years later

• at home i have all the space and time in the world

• my house is a museum of failures. or gallery of trying?

perhaps i avoid home because there’s so much guilt in looking back at these vessels of lost potential. the out-of-tune grand piano, my wood clarinet literally molding from neglect. the golf clubs and tennis rackets, all left-handed and thus negating their resale potential. my art room overflowing with vermillion and cerulean blue, across watercolor & oil pastel & colored pencils.

quotes: “I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.” - poetics of space

• and then there’s the words ive left behind. for all the activities i picked up, the one that was easiest were the ones that leant into escapsim.
• every physics note page is overwhelmed with doodles.
• whatt do i do with all the birthday cards from people who have long forgotten me? the love letters exchanged with those who exist only as ghosts in my psyche?
  • that time in middle school, scared shitless for my geometry exam, i wrote “i will get an A” 100 times over on postit notes. the next day i woke up and saw a note from my sister: “i believe in you! you can do it!”
  • i got a 50
• so many artifacts of an academically anxious child
  • my dad once said he raised us in this neighborhood because look all the kids around us: student class president, top ten colleges.
• i now kno
• on the drive back home i kept thinking about how this house is a reflection of my lost potential, how i look at it and see what i could have been and my parents see it as what they think i am. then i open the fridge and see their “proud cornell cup” and i understand immediately — my guilt exists only in a fantasia, and my immigrant parents have externalized a million times how proud they are for everything i’ve become. “dont you think thats the same thing? love & attention”

“a hous”

quotes: “I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.” - poetics of space

• my pandemic prison, were you my trap or my incubation? was i rotting or marinating? i always ask people if they would raise their kids in the place they grew up in.

“It was a beautiful idea, really, to wrap yourself up in memories and give old clothes a new life.” quotes: “I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.” - poetics of space

Gabriel

• house is defined not by the floorboards but the empty space inside
  -like feathers on a paper bird
• an emptiness to hold all their living
• you, created by a clock you too full to eat you too locked to lock
• to loved to love
• you too gone to save
• too nation to urge
  pilgrim bell
• the self i am today involves me as a lake involves its cattails

other poem:

• who can understand all that is yours

unpunctuted line can give you a lot of power

victoria chang

• the way that oursadness is plural but our grief is singular

• at what point does a rain drop its falling?

  • the moment a cloud buckles under the weight of it

• my optimism covered the whole ball

• to acknolwedge death is to acknowledge we must take another shape

• i used to think death as a type of anesthesia

• now i imagine long lines

• the dead holds the other half of our ticket

• the dead are an image of wind

i yearned to be changed but each drop was a small knife

losing a language

• we were born with a large door on our backs when will we know when it opens