The tent has now bleached from the weeks and weeks in the sun. I’ve placed an old pillow in the back, another to sit on. There’s a little trash can I empty daily in case I bring in a snack. The hand fan cost seven dollars.
My days now revolve largely around the two tasks: make a living for myself by finding and mailing the objects, and remember that time. Remember it more. Re-remember. Find another detail. Look again. There’s no formal routine, so once I’ve awoken in the darkness and settled into my spot, I usually begin by recalling what I was thinking about the day before, trying to walk myself back into it, to mentally draw it as closely and with as much detail as I can, to include myself in it, to experience more fully. It’s okay, I have told myself, to go back over the same material. It’s okay to remember new times, new days. To speak it aloud formally, like a speech. To ask myself questions, like an interview. Still, it is difficult work. My mind wanders constantly. Scraps of old action TV episodes rear up out of nowhere. I make menus for lunch, or recite facts from high school government class. Song lyric intrusions. Waves of sleepiness. When I am able to focus, since I was so cut off from what was happening as a child, sometimes it is more than anything like walking myself through a blankness, and all I can do is try to measure the quality of the blankness, if it’s a fizzy blank, or a misty blank, or a fog blank, or a morgue.
But even with all that, for a lot of the time, there’s actually plenty to sort through. What Vicky, in her disbelief, may not understand is that even though I was barely aware of what was going on at that time, even though I was drifting through the events like some sort of person-ghost, it’s not like the whole self just turns off and floats into air; we always do some sort of compensation, and for me, my entire sensory set of equipment was on high alert even as the rest of me, the processing part, closed down. I felt no feeling, and at any time of day would burst into tears severed from sadness, a physical racked sobbing like my body had to wrench it out even if my mind could not, and I’d sit like a stone during tearjerker movies, and my mother’s wavery, tentative phone calls, but I can still tell you in extensive detail about the tight brown-and-beige weave of the cushion on the sofa in the principal’s office waiting room as I sat looking at the secretary’s rose-stoned ring on her hand with its raised central vein right before she, the principal, called me into her egg-salad-scented office with the peppery sound of jackhammers working outside to tell me behind those thick black plastic framed glasses that my uncle was flying in to take me away.
So, most of the time, there’s all that to deal with. When I’m done for the morning, I crawl out, zip it up as per the usual, and close and lock the glass balcony door.
For the paying work, my job is much clearer. The new tissue paper/packing area is working well, and I’ve gotten faster at the time from sale to doorstep. The weekend’s packed with the yard sale visits, and the week filled with activities such as post office trips, emailing back clients, photographing and keeping track of the goods, wrapping and addressing the boxes. The rusted trumpet that to one person has lost its allure or perhaps is tainted by death or disappointment is a fresh object of love and music for Edna in Knoxville, or Franklin in Alhambra, and I spend my yard sale tours trying my best to see these things that others pass by, to spot an object on a table that has lost all connection to its identity, or maybe a better way to say it is that it has been so flooded with someone else’s identity that it has entirely lost its own. This might include old framed pictures, or mountains of snarled jewelry, or half-used perfume, or a shirt that doesn’t look interesting in a pile, seems overworn, used, tired, spent, but once washed and ironed will flatter a woman’s neckline and suddenly become the favorite new selection of her closet. These are the items to grab, to get for extremely low prices and later, large markups. And there is no shortage. The world is filling faster with those kinds of dead objects than practically anything else. I want to empty them of their former layers and hopes, and I can; all I do is buy them, and if need be, wash them, but mostly just see them by the acts of purchase, and documentation. Then I put their fresh new photos online, and the cycle begins again. My own apartment remains extremely spare.