My office is moving. Yes, yes, I'm moving with it but we'll get back to that.
I've been here for seven years, in this exact space. Before that I was in another office in the same building for two years. All told that's nine years of my life. Half of my twenties and nearly half of my thirties. Packing an office you've been in for almost a decade is revelatory, to say the least. It's also depressing and humbling. I've spent two weeks packing my desk, which is one of those executive-y, cherry colored beasts that's so heavy the management has decided to just leave it behind. In the new office I will be facing a wall, but hey, I'll be sitting at a fancy-shmancy glass drafting table. So practical!
Moving on...
I've had a large cork bulletin board above my desk since the day I started working here, back in 2001. I never look at it except when I need the number off a Rolodex card I've got pinned up there or to confirm the time zones in Japan (I'll be taking that handy chart with me). But when I removed the tacks from its pocked surface today I saw what's really been three inches from my face for nine years. Archives.
Today I removed from my bulletin board:
1.) Two postcards: one my brother sent me when he lived in Nantes and one my sister sent me from her honeymoon in Belize. When I look at the backs of them I see their handwriting and wonder what they would think of themselves if they were to read them now.
2.) Four photos: one of me standing on the Peak to Peak Highway in Colorado in a pair of hot pink flip flops. It was taken the summer before my wedding when I still had a head of long, chocolate colored hair. That summer was the last before I started thinking about Botox. I also found a self-portrait from my father with a ridge of blue-veined mountains behind him, one of me and my siblings at the only Thanksgiving we've celebrated together since I moved to New York in '95, and a shot of my husband and I on a Portland ferry before we were married. He's been asking me to take it down since I started the job because he thinks it makes him look like my pregnant lesbian partner. It's down to stay. I think I finally see it now.
3.) A mass card from a funeral I attended just after September 11th. He was only 26.
4.) A fortune cookie fortune that reads: "A new voyage will fill your life with untold memories." It had no idea.
5.) A clipping from the Indianapolis Star that my grandma sent me in 2001. It's that photo of the men at the World Trade Center site raising that famous cross-shaped metal beam from the wreckage. On the top of it she wrote in lower case letters: "oh yes". I havent' seen her handwriting in more than three years.
6.) My own handwriting on a yellow sticky note, which was buried under two address cards and the directions for how to print a Quicken report. It 's Freud, imagine that. "When inspiration does not come to me, I go halfway to meet it." Obviously not true. However, I do remember pinning that up during the 2006 winter Olympics. The American skater Sasha Cohen quoted him in an interview (weird). At the time, I must've thought it would be as easy as pinning up a sticky note to remind myself.
When I look at the remains of the bulletin board in my box I hear my own voice calling out to me. I see life and death and souvenirs. I think about how much I've seen and how much there is still to see. And I realize that everything changes, in spite of us. Everything changes. Always.
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