iMourn

Currently: Mourning the loss of my voicemails. Apparently when you switch from any phone to an iphone your voicemail gets completely wiped. I've had on there for years my niece calling me leaving messages for me, her sentences getting slowly more complicated as she got older, and the missed calls from my dad telling me his mom died or the time my parents calmly called letting me know my uncle had injured his head (from which he would die from a few days later). Going from dumb phone to a smarty (happened on 3-17-13) was an emotional experience, one I tried to put off for as long as I could, evading the urging of my wife, but it was nothing compared to the loss of those vmails, like I could physically feel it - it's one of those things, you know.

And I have the text messages on my phone that I've saved for years, the ones from the beginnings of when my wife (then gf) and I first started dating, to randoms - important ones but ones I don't remember because I havent looked at them for so long, to the ones where my sister texted about a fight she's having with my mom, one that's inspired my art work recently, to the ones notifying me that an old family friend suddenly died. These I actually still have on my old phone but they're encased forever in this physical body never being able to enter into the digital world again ostensibly making them useless. As my new phone was being activated I sat there completely engulfed in systematically, one-by-one, emailing to myself each of the 300 text messages so that they could have life again in their new virtual bodies, but my project was abruptly stopped as the activation when through. I got all of 30 or so messages sent - only the oldest ones. But this isn't nearly as bad as grief I feel from the lost voicemails.

I don't understand my obsession with documentation, the need to hold on to pieces of the past, and capture moments in the present, I'm convinced I'm a hoarder, of images, although I've never seen an episode from the series which has them as their subject, but you know they all have these crazy pasts like they got raped or had some traumatic relationship at some point, so it makes me wonder about myself, what ever happened to me. I just blame it on my slacker memory, I can't trust it so I'm dependent on physical evidence to trigger the thought. It might be the fumes or past substance abuse or it might not even be true, just a figment of my imagination but I won't risk it by not keeping the mementos that'll give my memory the shove it needs.

The Time is Near

Moving, moving, moving. Moving is never just moving. Moving is so much more than grabbing a bunch of things and throwing them in boxes. It is an emotional event. I sit there sorting through things, forced to decide what stays and what needs to go, forced to put value on material objects. It's easy if the value were based solely on things like age, make, material, demand but then there's the sentimental element. And that outweighs all other bases of appraisal. It's a tough deal. And then you're forced to look at your own life contemplate what value these material objects add to your life. Or if they've just become a collection of possessions that make moving way more complicated than it's supposed to be.


As I sort through the stacks of papers and piles of junk, I see pieces of my life being kept and some thrown away. Memories-precious and of course the painful ones scattered across the floor. Even a piece of hair might remind me of someone special or that receipt might trigger the memory of the time I was arrested on my 21st birthday or even the very ordinary day when I had an amazing conversation.


I found a card from my mom given to me the day of my grandmothers funeral-the outside envelope reads "David Kim from Grandmother's Gift", the card is one from the memorial service with a bible verse printed on the inside that begins "Dear friend," but with "friend" crossed out and replaced by "David Kim" and on the top right corner "October 2006"-three one hundred dollar bills folded inside. My mom had obviously made those adjustments but it felt like my grandmother had...I mean that was her style; simple phrases in limited English. And for the first time I felt a sadness I hadn't felt before.