soul glimpses, or, scraps of paper

Sad day: I pretty much ran out of things to give away. Still too many boxes in my closet, though, so I'm going through them trying to throw away as much as possible. It's pretty much all paper--essays from high school, journals, stories I started to write, etc. Every now and then I come across a sentence or phrase that I wrote down and kept because I found it very beautiful. I think I kept them in case I wanted to use them in a novel. I always forget about them until next time I clean out my closet, and anyway I'll write new ones that are actually relevant to my novel when I write it. If I leave my words here, maybe I can finally throw these (worn, crumpled, ripped) pieces of paper away.

...Rosary beads sliding through my fingers like water droplets leaking out of a half-empty glass.
I cut this from an application essay to a college I didn't go to.

...who walks off the muddy football field with clean pants.
I still remember who I wrote this about. This was the kid nobody liked, who talked to me for about 30 minutes in the teacher's lounge and taught me patience. He was a good kid.

Being late can be okay. The second mouse gets the cheese.
Saw this on a church sign.

Ideas. They come to my mind from my ears or my eyes. They travel down my head down my neck through my arm to my hand. There, they travel through my pen onto paper.
I wrote this in yellow pen on a yellow sticky note (what was I thinking?) with line breaks making it looks lightly more poetic.

Other things I found while cleaning out:

• my drill book from freshman year marching band
• activity rotation schedule from Camp Copneconic, eighth grade
• small green plastic seal or porpoise or something
• cassette tape of our late dog, Nellie, singing
• late slip excusing me to go to Tony's grandma's funeral
• a shoebox with every trophy, plaque, letter, pin, etc. since seventh grade
• the all-purpose poetry anthology for HH9 English
• Fiddler on the Roof music from junior year in high school pit band
• Western and American Heritage supplementary readers
• a note about balloon pop polka
• a shoebox full of poetry--poetry I would dismiss as melodramatic teenage angst if I didn't remember so vividly what was going on and how much I hurt when I wrote it.
• my junior and cadette girl scout vests, both of which will probably be worth a lot of money in a few years since Fairwinds Council folded. I've got a lot a lot of patches on my junior vest. I think I'll give it a few years, then find the Mike Beratta of girl scouts and donate them.
• a plaster model of my late dog, Nellie
• a hairbrush my grandmother gave me when I turned 10
• my old 35mm point-and-shoot and a roll of undeveloped film with photos of the Wisconsin Dells
• my double-jointed swiss army knife
• my protest against the artificial Christmas tree

That's all for now, folks. I have 13 boxes on my floor and two on my bed that will be on my floor in a minute so I can sleep.