M

Today I found again the drawer full of old spectacles. Like a
history of my failng eyes.
I tried a couple of pairs on again, painfully reminded of the
disadvantages I had to choose between ; excruciating pain where the
circular orange ones (!) dug in behind my ears, or the dint in my nose
left by the nice but loose tortoiseshells. The latter reeked of
nostalgia. I wonder how perfume could still possibly pervade something
so plastic.

There's a shop in town, an optician who has a bin full of the things.
And a sign asking you to discard them there. The bin is full of sad
looking faces, you see the yellowish tinge of old plastic, some with
the funny pink bobbles missing over the nose, the occasional addition
of sellotape, and it's easy to start fleshing them in.

They donate them to third world countries. For six months now these
spectacles have been waiting in the drawer to be donated. I have
visions of crowds of ghandis. Small babies with huge housefly
eyes.

I once took out 4 pairs and left them on the sideboard. But the
familiarity of objects means they became fixtures. And never made it to
the opticians. Which is a shame, spectacles are so expensive. I will
feel good once I have dropped them in the opticians bin. Not really
because I've pointed them in the right direction, but because thowing
anything away is for me some kind of closure.

Yes maybe i am selfish..................

Cluttered people like myself will understand what I mean.

How many times have I stumbled over the vacuum cleaner whilst searching
for it and still not noticed?

It's morbid I know, but there came a time in my life when I started
facing up to the fact that one day, if I don't make some definite move
towards 'closure' , some poor relative or friend will have the sad task
of deciding what to do with all my mementos and souvenirs. I hope that
time will be a long way away and give me plenty of opportunity to fill
the old bin bags.

It was when I had to singlehandedly clear out my boyfriend's flat. He
asked me to do it from the hospital bed. The next time I visited I
looked him in the eye and said I'd sorted out everything into cardboard
boxes. I was remembering how soon it went dark in the afternoon and how
cold the flat felt. I tried not to read the diaries and notebooks.
Because it was dark I stuffed a whole pile of them in my handbag. I
decided to read them at home, though I didn't have to.

I decided it was better for our understanding and my future grieving if
I could know the simpler reasons behind his complicated thoughts.

He looked me in the eye and we never mentioned it again. It was a tacit
understanding that I now knew all his private thoughts.

I kept the private thoughts for a couple of years and then set fire to
them.
It was a ritual in my back garden on a dry day .

I burnt a lot of my own too. I'm not a pyromaniac but I got some kick
out of watching the flames wrap around that stupid woman's awful
touching poems written in that inhumanly neat script.