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After I posted yesterday, Harry came over and we made one last sordid attempt to find a prom dress for me. "Why are there no normal dresses?" Harry complained. "They all look like halloween costumes." I laughed, but of course, no sound came out. "You know what kind of dress you should look for?" he asked, as though struck with a sudden inspiration. "What?" I croaked. "You know... the stuff that lady wears... with the long cigarette, and the bun... what's her name?" "You mean Audrey Hepburn?" "Yeah, her. She had cool clothes." I grinned. "I'll try." Oh, the irony and understatement of it all.

Anyway, we went home and dried off (it was raining) and I fell asleep for a few minutes and then Harry fell asleep for a while. I used the time to sift through boxes of old papers, with the idea of trashing most of them. I made it through one box before the emotional content became too great and I had to stop.

There were all of my notebooks from last year, all of my creepy black ink drawings and all of my creative writing stories and all the notes I passed and the drawings Elena and Avery did when she visited last year and Chris thought they were Mexicans. The notes I jotted in the margins when I was intimidated by Rock & Mythology Club (can you imagine?), the sketches of clothes that I finally made last summer, ridiculous drawings of myself in my Mary Quite Contrary costume (I hated the bonnet), I LOVE MACBETH scrawled across the edges of my somewhat distracted History notes, a drawing Chloe gave me, the label of Julia's Pocari Sweat bottle pasted to the cover of my History notebook ("What is a Pocari, and why are we drinking its sweat?"), a photo Chloe gave me once of myself in full hippie garb, smiling in the sun, barefooted outside the Reading Room. Across the back of one of the songs I wrote for Fish's Songwriting class: "I really like Harry. A lot. But I'm being stupid, because he's so much older than me and so much more interesting and so... I don't know. I know I'll probably always be a little kid to him, and I still can't stop hoping." The full lyrics to Ballad of the Gypsy Girl. (There were seven stanzas! I completely forgot about the other four when I posted it here a few weeks ago.) At the beginning of the year, a printout of a conversation with Andy (Edit: McVoy, not Fish). Essays that I was proud of. Essays that I hated writing. A list I thought I'd lost of the 20 books I intended to read before the year ended. (I've read about half of them now.) Detailed lens sketches from Physics, with hastily-scrawled notes from Jeff in the margins. MEAN PEOPLE SUCK stickers from the days when I still knew people on St. Mark's Place. The full liner notes of The Gaslight Tapes (the earliest known Dylan bootleg). Even a piece of music I used to sing with Andres Andrade, my old voice instructor. It was Poisoning Pidgeons In The Park, the last piece he gave me before I accidentally stopped attending. The notes I took at Columbia last summer; the endless interviews, handouts, pasted layout plans and letters to Mr. D, the world's best journalism teacher. A year of my life that's over. And I found myself missing it terribly, wishing I could live it over again. All the friends I made, all the insecurities I shed, all the love I found and the freedom I grew to embrace, the gypsy inside of me that emerged. I think maybe I've lost sight of that a little bit. I could stand to learn from my past self. I was so very young, and so old at the same time...

I detached a few random drawings, saved all of my work for English and a few essays I thought Renata might use some day, saved the photos and my poetry/songwriting notebook, all the Creative Writing stuff, and a few other key pieces, and threw away everything else. It's my past and I'll always remember it, but I don't need to save all that junk, because I'll probably never look through it all again if I save too much. Still, it hurt to see the bottom of the box and know I'd lost them all. It struck me that this was my life; I've already lived a chunk of it, and I'll never get it back. These are the memories I'll have to look back on when I'm old, the friends I'll always remember, the person I've turned into. I shoved the remaining papers into the box and went over to wake up Harry, wondering how my freshman self would have reacted if she'd seen this boy she didn't know, this single tender kiss.

I guess I kind of like my life.