An old sweater, gloves, a school backpack – some things we have very special feelings. Maybe that’s why the hand does not rise to throw them away.
My knitted gloves, bought twelve years ago in New York, were left on the seat of a bright orange chair in a Paris subway station. Treacherously forgotten at the end of a hard February day, when the head did not understand anything. A pitiful excuse indeed…
I have always acutely felt the orphanhood of things. This property of mine seemed strange to me myself, so I didn’t particularly spread about it, you never know what people will think! Over time, reading books, I learned that I was not the only one. Here is Platonov’s Voshchev from “The Pit” – he walks around the world, collects all sorts of withered leaves, pebbles and other nonsense, and saves him from obscurity with his attention. And at the same time himself – from the anguish of existence … Here is Innokenty Annensky – he will regret the faded violet forgotten in the book, the fog on the windows, the willow that the crazy Ophelia broke … Here is Alexander Kushner with his amazing poem about an old sugar bowl ready to burst into tears that outlived its owners …
How to part with this thing, if we met so long ago and chose each other?
Our secret relationship with things, it turns out, is normal. And the sadness of losing things can be experienced acutely, humanly. I, for example, for a long time could not stop thinking about my forgotten gloves. Everyone imagined, no matter how stupid it was, that they silently called me when I got up and went to the exit of the subway. All the same, for twelve years we were related. I don’t know how they felt in Moscow after New York, maybe it’s bad, but they got used to me, and I to them. And I did not remember them that February evening. Maybe, in fact, they are now even better in Paris after Moscow, but for some reason it seems to me that nothing is better. Because I feel bad without them. I go and freeze and do not buy new ones. To prove fidelity … Actually, the logic is strange: it seems to me that they feel bad without me, because I feel bad without them. An aberration of the consciousness of a lover/lover/possessor. Inability and unwillingness to understand the other. Maybe, in fact, this other was only waiting to be forgotten somewhere, to be finally left alone in some bright orange chair. How to understand this, sitting locked up inside yourself and looking at life through the embrasure of your understanding?
Now I’m walking around in shirts that I got on occasion, which suddenly changed their owner for themselves. What do they think about this? I also have one familiar pencil, with a retractable thin lead, which I have been very fond of for many years and which I frantically check to see if it is in my pocket. And what will he say about my attitude towards him? In the very depths of the wardrobe I keep a green and brown vest, which they bought me, for example, at the age of six. I remember when and where and what other vests were nearby – but no, I chose this one. How can I throw her away if we met so long ago and if I myself told her: “You are mine”? Almost gave a word of honor. And now I languish her in the closet, where she may have already suffocated and died from my love and loyalty to her …