New Years

Okay, so maybe last night was the cosmically couldn't-have-picked-a-worse-night night to do what I did. But it started out as a perfectly legitimate Project For A Lonely New Years' Eve--working on my quilt and watching a bunch of whatever cable cared to throw at me.



Well...See, I've got a horrible sentimental streak. I'll admit that. In my foyer closet, mixed in with the many boxes of closet-stuff with almost no sentimental value, there is one box filled with things that belonged in my life with JP. His two Nirvana shirts are there; his drumsticks, which he always said were the one object that defined where "home" was for him. Pictures, of course--pictures of him, pictures of his son. The strap from his guitar; pages and pages of scraps of lyrics. His obituary and the program from his funeral.



I went into that box last night--there was a good reason, which I'll get to--and went through everything piece by piece. I found a love note I thought I'd lost; letters I'd written to him while I couldn't see him, while I was living at my mom's. I found a letter he'd written to Margot, who he'd lost touch with, telling her how much he wanted her to be in the band, how important the band was to him. It all brought back a lot of memories, to say the very least--especially the letter to Margot.



Margot then was a lot like I was about four years ago--making all sorts of bad choices in relationships, staying with men who treated her badly and openly abused her. JP knew about this; he was scared for her, and--at least a little bit--scared for the place where she fit into his plan. That band was everything to him; Margot was the girl he'd taken to see Nirvana, despite the fact that his girlfriend at the time was in the hospital after giving birth to their son, the son they put up for adoption a few days later. They were barely-together, JP and his girl; they had broken up a few months earlier and she had gone home to her people, only to resurface a couple months later with the news that she was pregnant. They broke up for good a few months later, very shortly before I came on the scene. He told me she was trying to get him to come back to her, asked me to call him every day to strengthen his resolve to stay away. A few months later, when we were living together, we lay in bed one night and she told me all the things she'd done, all the things he'd done in retribution--and he cried about it. "She hurt me so bad," he said.



Margot, on the other hand, had been his friend since college; she understood him, he said, in a way that his family didn't. In the letter he talked about that--how his family saw the band as "some ridiculous rock-star pipe dream", how they didn't care that it was the only thing that mattered to him, how they kept telling him to get a "real" job, to go to work every day for the rest of his life--which was his worst nightmare, he said. It was the band or nothing--and he had given himself a deadline. If he hadn't made it by the time he was 30, that was it. He didn't want to live the life he saw his mother and his father and his older cousins living; it wasn't something that was open to compromise.



We had talked about all this, of course. It was a plan I wholeheartedly supported; I didn't want that life for myself any more than he wanted it for himself. Between ourselves we knew the deadline was always open to extension--and besides, once we straightened out a bit and quit the drugs, we wanted kids. (We'd even picked out names.) And neither of us would be so selfish as to kill ourselves if we had kids. We both knew that; it, too, was part of the plan. We had a high sense of our own drama and were more than happy to indulge each other that way.



It was always going to be something we did together, though--like everything else, if we got tired of living, we would make our exit together. Never discussed--never on the docket--was the possibility that one of us would die and leave the other one behind. Neither of us ever expected that ten years later, all that would be left of what we had would be memories and a box of treasures--letters and photos, drumsticks and lyrics, scraps of a grand plan that never came to fruit.



Also in that box was a torn flannel shirt, purple and red and blue and black, with a rip down the middle of the back. It was one of the things I'd collected from his mother's house after he died; I'd never washed it, and for years afterward I could still smell him on that shirt. Then one day a couple of years ago I picked it up, looking for something underneath it, and--nothing, just the smell of dust and flannel. And that was like losing him all over again, in a small way.



I thought of the shirt again when I started making this quilt--different plaid flannel squares alternating with white--and last night, I decided to pull the shirt out and work pieces of it into the quilt; to put it to good use instead of letting it just sit in a box. A practical impulse, seized for less-than-practical reasons. So I sat on the sofa, watching _Valley of the Dolls_ on cable, cutting this flannel shirt along the seams.



The thing about quilts--about sewing in general, actually--is that it involves a lot of ironing. Everything has to be pressed if you want to get straight cuts out of it--long-packed-away flannel shirts especially. So I set up the ironing board, on New Years Eve, and ironed the scraps, sitting in front of the TV.



The heat of the iron touched the fabric, and on the steam, a faint familiar scent rose up--a ghost I thought I'd long forgotten, the way you sometimes forget a long-unseen face, or the sound of a voice you don't hear anymore.



I laid my head down on the ironing board and cried, one more time, for all I've lost.