I want to tie as much as I can to furniture and time. It is April 17, 2000. I am twenty-two. I want to write books that go on bookshelves. I want to write beautiful books, perfect paper flowers, pure concaving universes between glossy covers. But what you are reading now isn't tied to a bookcase. What I am writing now is tied to my dresser.
The two top drawers in my dresser can't close because they are filled up with the pieces of paper I write on. The drawers were designed for socks and underwear and secret mementos. Safety pins and cameras and sunglasses, maybe some pen caps and the plastic eggs pantyhose used to come in. I've seen myself as a writer ever since I was little. I read the diary of Anne Frank and saw my own puberty as rich and somehow entertaining--as a varied and compelling narrative. Looking back I realize that, no, I was not an interesting fourteen year old. I've catalogued my different humiliations self-consciously, with discipline. I can use my junk drawers however I want. I don't have scissors or buttons. I don't have coins from other countries so it's ok that the top drawers are used up. The specific home for these papers is less ok, more ambiguous. They were in the drawer underneath the two small top drawers. They were in the sweater drawer, displacing my winter clothes. I'm moving to my first apartment and these enclosed items are moving with me, leaving the sweater drawer and going into a box my grandmother got from work. It held a carton of unwrapped soaps so it's fragrant and waxy on the inside.
I always need to introduce things, to locate things. So there it is. Warm flowery spring. White pressboard dresser, cheap but reminiscent of a fairy tale. Time and furniture.