When I Have To Leave Here
People��ask me what I���m going to do when I have to leave my father���s house now that he���s gone, and I always give them the same answer. ���I don���t know.��� It���s the truth. I don���t know, and it���s rather liberating for a worrier such as I am not to know and not to care. I do think about the near future occasionally, wondering if something wonderful will come and shove me in a certain direction. (Any sign would have to be an obvious push because otherwise I would miss it or misinterpret it.) But for the most part, I���m enjoying not caring. I have a place to stay tonight and maybe to the end of the year. That seems security enough for me right now.
Other people are more worried than I am about my blank future, and most offer suggestions of what I should do. Often those suggestions reflect more their own blighted dreams than my needs. For example, I applied to mYAMAdventure.com in response to one such dream. The friend who sent me the link can���t do a Pacific Crest Trail thru-hike and since she doesn���t know anyone who did, she���d like to live vicariously through my hike. (Assuming, of course, I ever do such a dangerous thing.)
I won���t be on the street, that I know — I���ve had an offer of a place to stay in an emergency. Nor will I be destitute. I���ll have enough to get by for a while no matter what happens.
Meantime, I���m clearing out what I can of my still too numerous possessions and packing up the things that I���m not yet ready to get rid of. A year or two of paying storage costs might make me change my mind about what is important, but for now I���m keeping the necessities such as pots and pans, dishes, eating utensils, comforters, a rainbow assortment of towels — all the familiar household goods that will make some future place feel like home. (The urge to chuck it all looms up occasionally, but I���m not quite ready to obliterate my past.) I also have boxes of notes, notebooks, and started novels (one that has yet to be typed up. Yikes), and a few irreplaceable items such as the tables my now deceased brother made for me. (His death started the long siege of losses I���ve suffered in the past eight years.)
The n
on-essentials are harder to know what to do with. For example, I have the handwritten first draft of all my books. I write long hand, silly though that might seem nowadays, but when I wrote those books, I didn���t have a computer or even a typewriter. Just pencil, paper, time, and me. So, do I continue to keep those first drafts? Or do I toss them out? (Not a rhetorical question. I really do want to know.) It doesn���t look as if I will be a brand name author any time soon, so I don���t need them for posterity. And anyway, the published books deviated quite a bit from those first drafts. (In at least one case, the final book resembles the draft not at all.) Unless someone comes up with a good reason for keeping them, out they go.
Such are the small decisions of my life. The major ones might take care of themselves, and if they don���t, well . . . I���ll worry about that when the time comes.
For now I���m basking in the glory of not knowing.
***
Pat Bertram is the author of the suspense novels Light Bringer, More Deaths Than One, A Spark of Heavenly Fire, and Daughter Am I. Bertram is also the author of Grief: The Great Yearning, ���an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.��� Connect with Pat on Google+. Like Pat on Facebook.
Tagged: blank future, handwritten first draft, keeping first drafts, Pacific Crest Trail, where to go
