Amanda of the D'Ubervilles

I am beginning to feel like a tragic novel.

This weekend SPF and I went to retrieve some of our stored belongings that we had removed from the condo in fear that it would collapse. These would be items that we wanted to be sure were safe, so we pulled them out of danger and stuffed them securely in a concrete safehouse.

When we walked into the building, I first noticed that there were long, leaky cracks in the floor that had been solid concrete. Everything after that is as if in a bad dream.

Water was pooled in front of our storage unit. When opened, at least 60% of the floor was covered in water and those precious belongings - boxes containing my childhood memories, drawings, pictures, journals, letters and birthday cards, toys, and clothing - were sagging and rotting in the brackish water.

We carefully extracted the decrepit boxes and carted them home, after SPF yelled at the man running the storage unit and got nothing out of him. I closed our account.

We spent the next several hours trying to save what we could, but something like 2/3rds of it was damaged beyond saving. We painstakingly separated soaking papers to try and save stories and journals that I had written in my childhood and through high school. My negatives of my trip to Italy were destroyed, but we pulled them apart and dried them out anyways. It's harder to let go of some things than others.

My astronomy notes from college were protected, but poetry I had tried to so carefully protect became a catalyst to destroy everything it touched, having been written in pure ink that bled into every paper, envelope, novel, and t-shirt in its near vicinity. The pages themselves we spread out all over our kitchen, but they are illegible, excepting a word or two, or perhaps a phrase out of context. I do not remember what they were.

The stuffed bear that my grandmother gave me before she died has molded and made SPF sick when he tried to salvage it. My grades and comments from high school and college have bled into each other, but some of them we were able to dry out and keep.

I go back and forth between moving on and being thankful of everything that we still have, and weeping because I don't know what I have done to the universe to deserve these repetitive injuries.

If you are wondering why I would write all of this down, it is because I am sure that you will find out, and as much as I want to tell you, to apologize for somehow not being careful enough, I can't. I don't want to talk about it. I don't want to be sad anymore. I am dehydrated and tired.

So now you know.