sifting

She's a mess(I call my home PC, May, for reasons I forget) and her desktop is a milieu of download scraps, photos yet to be uploaded, and my mom's Popcap games--how they got there, I can only fear for. So I worked stolidly with her, moving this and clearing that but mostly deleting most of it. Random pictures, the occasional unknown setup file, and zounds of scanned materials of objectionable nature disappeared with every button press.

But as I went on, it got harder and harder to press 'Delete'. It almost felt that I wasn't cleaning anymore. Instead, I was severing a limb I've forgotten how to use. It was so much easier outside the borders of my LCD screen, here in the real world where the old shoes and worn shirts can be replaced by better, brighter purchases off of the shelves. But here, inside her, in that olden heart of hers I've kept hidden the tatters, scraps, paraphernalia of who I am through the years. It was a virtual scrapbook of what I've been up to:

A few gigs of scanned japanese comics(just slightly intelligible now after JLPT), mish-mash of music lovingly and randomly found, voluminous applications for work and play, documents and records of college life and how hard and fruitful it's been, and in the darkness, neatly folded among digital shadows, assorted media for more banal pursuits whose size, though unmeasured, can only be felt like a hulking iceberg in the mists.

But of them all, the most prized are my pictures. Photos upon photos of everyone and everything and I can't help but feel sorry for what wonderful fleeting moments escaped the eyes of the camera's lens. There's so much joy, sorrow, guilt, and excitement consuming me and my memories and my nostalgia. In here, friends are still friends, loved ones are still breathing, and the smiles never fade.

And it is a wonderful thing, to have do this errant job every now and then, to sift through the debris of yesteryear's and uncover the beaten path, the long, sometimes lonesome, other times taxing, route we forged through the wild landscape of life--and somehow survived. I am looking at who I was and I am proud. And as I turn and look at who I will be, I am thrilled. The journey was long and longer still, but remembering and finding that pride in the strength, that constant wind that carried us through all these years, and believing that there's still yet more to offer, to spend, and to light the darkest nights and to warm the coldest emptiness, is nourishing.

Only time will tell where we end up in the future. But from the looks of my detritus, it'll be awesome--albeit, cluttered, and a bit raunchy.