In The Chest - All The Special Things

For my 18th birthday, my parents gave me an antique wooden chest. I had always loved chests. (The kind you put things in, not the kind that grow hair and nipples [though, you know, they're good too].) This one had several compartments, including a secret drawer and a hidden shelf. It was magnificent.

Over the years, I put all my special things in that chest. Love letters from my boyfriends and future husband. ID badges from my jobs. The program from the Young Talent Time concert I went to with my sister. My Brownie Guide Manual. The edition of TV Week I featured in after my short lived career as an actress. Broken watches and pieces of jewelry and notes from my friends and a dozen or more handwritten journals.

My life was in that chest.

This is not my chest (or phone, or plant, or truck) but it's very similar indeed

The chest followed me wherever I went. Once I was married, I pretty much stopped adding to it, but the chest lived contentedly at the end of our bed, often covered with clothes or blankets or a pile of books.

When I moved out of my marital home last year, the chest moved with me. There was no room for it in my current bedroom, so I put it out in the lounge room. But the idea of my most personal, private possessions being out in the lounge room made me feel too intensely vulnerable. The thought that one of my kids or their friends could rummage through that chest, sifting through my woeful poems and diarized confessions and proclamations of unrequited love was just too agonizingly hideous to contemplate.

It was time for the chest to give up its contents, and be put to use for some other purpose.

I transferred all my papers and books and treasures into an air-tight plastic wheelie, which now lives in the back of the store room. The chest is now filled with DVDs and strange power cords and random fragments of technology that I am too scared to discard. It is a platform for Lego and My Little Ponies and pillows and the cat, and is battered and weathered and chipped.

But I love that chest, and it will always be with me. And one day, I want it to live on in the home of my eldest daughter.

As for the wheelie bin of memories, well, the idea of someone looking at them is still too hideous to contemplate. Then again, there's an amazing Young Talent Time program there that someone will really love... and an ID badge from David Jones that's kind of cute... and some airmail letters from my ex boyfriend R that are really very special...

Think I'm just going to pop down to the storeroom for a while....

Regrets? I've Had A... Oops! They're Gone!

Since I've been able to wield a pen, I have kept diaries. They are excruciating to read. Dozens of little notebooks, smeared with blue ink, detailing every crush, every fight with a friend, every crush, every frustration, every crush, every dream, every crush, every act of rebellion, and did I mention every crush?

The most painful diaries to read are my Anne Frank style diaries, in which I gave the journal a name and wrote a letter to it every night. It was a notepad, for gods sake. I was writing to myself. I was twelve, but I still can't quite forgive myself for the pretention. I cringe even thinking about it. Please. Make. Me. STOP.

My sister also kept diaries. I was deeply respectful of her privacy, and would never, in a million years, have even considered trying to read one. She clearly didn't appreciate this, because she wrote in black texta on the first page of one such journal:

Kerri you are a bitch.

At least, I would have known this if I had ever picked up her diary and had a read. Which I didn't, of course. I was deeply respectful of her privacy. Ahem.

I still have my written diaries. They are stored in a sealed, plastic box in my storeroom, to be read after my death by anyone interested in a tormented, pretentious teenager with a tragic series of passionate, unrequited crushes.

By the mid nineties, I had become addicted to keyboards, and began writing my journals in electronic form. Thousands of words, committed to secret documents, locked by a password I still use today.

No-one will ever crack it. At least, so I pray.

The problem, of course, is that secret files are disposable. It is so much easier to hit 'delete' than it is to throw out a bound journal. It is so much easier to trash a file that brings back painful memories than it is to store it away in a sealed, plastic box.

And so I deleted dozens of files over the past twenty years. Dozens of files recording my life and my angst. Thousands of memories of good times and bad. Thousands of moments of anguish and joy.

I zapped my regrets with a press of a button. I zapped my regrets and I will never get them back. The words are now lost in the black of the Ethernet.

And that, I can tell you, is my greatest regret of all.

For those participating in next week's #MyFirst challenge (see here) the topic will be
My First Moment of Terror