My life is now all packed in neet square boxes or in black plastick bags, some of it sitting in the cold dark attic of an appartment building in Stockholm and some of it in the same building inside the appartment where i have been sleeping on a matress the past 5 days. I have had this thought these past few days about how it feels when you go through all of your things (for example when you move to a new place and have to decide what you want to take with you and what you want to throw). I feel that it’s like going through your own past, memories, emotions… you are actually inside yourself and at the same time very much outside yourself, realising how many things you have and how much dust has landed on them. Also the different states of emotions that you go through make it clear how much of yourself is in the things around you. You see an old letter you wrote to someone you were in love with, you see a photo that you haven’t seen in years of you and your sister, realising how you both aged, you are sad and the dust makes you sneese, makes it hard to breathe. After a while you also find some old treasures, a nice drawing you made a long time ago, a shirt you never wore and you start feeling refreshed by this digging, as if you are shaking your insides and waking up old energies that have been locked inside.
Maybe we gather things as a way to store away our own mortality. As long as you don’t really know what’s lying in the closet underneath all the suits or what’s inside these boxes you see everytime you open the storage room door, you know that between being and not being you have a wall of boxes with your things inside.
Michael Shapira 