Column:

On living, and packing, well

By Polina Yamshchikov

Published Dec. 7, 2007

I have been packing in preparation for going off to Washington, D.C., for Christmas. It's so cathartic — I like the idea of folding my life neatly, ordering it in a suitcase, and then assembling it differently in some different locale. I like the idea of my possessions and life as being rather fluid. I'd like to think they could shift at any time.

Packing also comforts me because it provides excuses for me to remember things. I brush my fingers over the scarf I wrapped tightly around my face the night I walked home in a blizzard, feeling a ghostly reincarnation of the dull fire in my chest that night as snow settled on my eyelashes. I pack my favorite red shoes, the adventure shoes, and pause to think about the dust that we left behind us on that unpaved stretch, like a long unending trail of pure white light, and the taste of cigarette smoke in my hair and my clothes and my mouth. That dark field full of fireflies, like stars, flickering above the tall grass.

I find a photo of my favorite teacher, the one who died a few years ago, and tuck it between two sweaters.

Lately I have been rather preoccupied with ending. Or, more accurately, with living in such a way that you are worthy of that end when it comes.

I cannot picture a life after this one; regardless of whether or not I believe that one exists, it is decidedly beyond the scope of my limited imagining.

So there is this life, this time and only this.

And then there is the thin, tenuous hope that you will go on in some form or fashion, in words or bloodlines or history textbooks. I would like to go on, to write stories that will never really die.

But I won't mind terribly if I don't — it is the nature of this earth to forget. So I will live as vibrantly, write as eloquently, love as passionately as I can for as long as this body will last. And when it goes, I will not look back in regret. I will not wish for more time.

A life like that for me exists only in writing, I think. I want to write and write until I have bled the words of out me, until I have spilled my guts in this confessional. I want to tell you about the sharpness of loss and desire, and how both have reduced us to something smaller than we are, have made us harder and yet somehow inexplicably softer, worn down our edges to nothing. I would fill my hands with these words, fistfuls of syllables clutched close to my heart, digging my nails into their meanings. I am obsessed with the idea of getting it right, of telling everyone once and for all what I have been waiting so long to say, so when I have found myself at the very end, I will, at best, not be disappointed.

But I will say it again.

It is not the end that fascinates me. It is the uncertainty that we long for, the moment at the edge, the possibility of infinity.

It is neither the held breath nor its release that we desire but rather what comes in between: the anticipation, the lightheadedness, the point at which we could deviate from the familiar, the tangible or the known. We were not made to last — living is a process of forgetting. And so it is only in dreams that we may recall, fleetingly, the treachery of being born, the heaviness of air, the grace of flight.

So I fold another pair of jeans.

pvyrmf@mizzou.edu