Last night we had dinner at my mom’s house in south Oklahoma City. When we left, Brian left his phone sitting on my mom’s kitchen counter, and so this morning I drove down there to get it for him, and we planned to meet up for lunch. I drove down, making it in much less time than I’d anticipated, and found myself with almost an hour to spare before I had to start back up toward the spot where we’d agreed to meet.

My mom has lived in her house for sixteen years last month. She bought it, and we moved in, when I was in the eighth grade. It’s where I lived all through high school and, with the exception of the summer I spent in Ireland, every break throughout college. I lived there for eight months after I dropped out of Yale, and again my first semester of graduate school, before Brian and i started dating.

Since I had some time to kill, I went upstairs to my old bedroom and started nosing around. The walls up there are bare now, freed from all the posters and little pictures I decorated with over the years. In the corner sits a desk I inherited from my great-grandmother. I wrote my first *real* novel sitting at that desk. It took two years, I finished it for my first novel writing course in grad school, and it was awful. There’s a book shelf atop the desk; on the shelves are empty CD cases, some old cassette tapes and a few books. There’s the mug all of us who went to WHS Prom in 1998 got; it’s filled with thumb tacks and a matchbook from a hotel I stayed at in Ljubljana, Slovenia, in September of 2000.

I pulled out the drawer. It was like finding buried treasure.

What you see in this photo is just the surface of things. There’s a photo of me and my friends Mark and Woody loitering in front of a no-loitering sign at Hanes Mall in Winston-Salem. There’s a creepy Teletubby knockoff toy whose eyes used to light up red – one of the creepiest things ever, which cracked me up when it was given to me. There’s a letter from Woody written in July 2004, a box of markers, some Bed Bath & Beyond sheet spray given to me for Christmas 1998 by someone I once called a friend. My first cell phone, which I loved. For some reason there were about a dozen condoms; all expired, now.

“For some reason” - I know why. It’s because I used to think I was such hot shit; turned out not to be the case, and in retrospect I couldn’t be happier about that fact. Also, I got them for free.

A rainbow WWJD bracelet. Some incense, glow bracelets from Pride 2004. Photos of boys I used to have crushes on and friends I’ve since bade farewell. Such an odd collection of detritus, a cross section of my life from 1996 to 2005 or so.

It made me happy to rifle through this collection of stuff, none of which is actually worth saving. I found an undeveloped roll of black and white film I took in high school; I have no idea what those photos are of now. I took it, and a copy of my birth certificate. The rest I left there, a time capsule.

I’ve been having a problem with the past lately. I’ve written a little about it; attacks of nostalgia, you could say, and intense wishes I could redo certain parts – everything from getting better grades in high school to avoiding hurtful and unhealthy people. It’s been difficult to deal with, of late, these intense feelings of regret. But finding this stuff this morning, picking up each individual item, looking it over, and putting it back, like an archeologist – it was healing. I realized I wouldn’t trade a single one of those memories, a single one of those mistakes. I like who I am and where I’ve come to.

Later, I met up with Brian and gave him back his cell phone. I love him so much and wouldn’t change anything about our life together. After that I went to meet with my friend David, who had read my novel and wanted to give me feedback. I’d been a little terrified about this meeting, just because there’s intense risk in showing anyone anything you create. But he liked the novel, had helpful suggestions, and we talked for an hour and a half.

Now I’m sitting on my front porch. It’s a gorgeous spring day. Sam’s asleep underneath my chair and Brian gets off work in 10 minutes. Things are amazing. I can’t believe how much rifling through a drawer of my random old shit – and then putting it all back where it was and walking away – has helped. Who was it who said that self-forgiveness is giving up all hope of ever having had a different past?

Anyway, everything I’ve said here happens to have been summed up perfectly in a song. So, Mary-Chapin, take it away: