I am selling everything. I am selling my Mizoguchi DVDs, my Pink Floyd records, my Murakami novels. I am selling the colourful squares I propped on my wall and called an identity. I am selling them because I am leaving this room with its green walls and its narrow view of a quarter of the sunset, and when my sister takes her long-awaited residence here she will only put them in a cardboard box, where they will sit and would collect dust, if not for the masking tape that seals them from the light of day.
But I know I am also selling them to run away, to evade what overcame me on the train from the dentist, the un-damming of my soul that I worshipped art for its capacity to do, this time Michelle Zauner’s Crying in H Mart. I am selling them to stay one step ahead of this aching wave that dispossesses each recollection of its colour and engenders it with blue instead.
I don’t know if Fredric, Khush and Hanmin remember the three books they got me for my 19th birthday––Giovanni’s Room, To the Lighthouse, The Myth of Sisyphus––or if Dongyeon remembers the two records he got me for my 18th––Scary Monsters and The Dark Side of the Moon––but I do know that for a moment in a day, they held each object in their hands and gazed on their own distinct memory of me and decided yes, he would appreciate this. I once edgily played Bitches Brew at the gym and was clowned for playing “traffic noises,” then Fredric got me a Miles Davis record for my 18th, with the playful remark: “I got you traffic noises.” It does not matter that I had already read The Myth of Sisyphus, or that my favourite David Bowie record was actually Low. For in contemplating what to get me, their whole lives were briefly filled with their own private characterisations of me, which were as valid a representation of me as any artifice I could have conjured for myself.
It breaks my heart even more to think on the books my mother gifted me. She cared not for reading and less so for what I read, but she cared enough to call Kinokuniya and reserve Malcolm X’s Autobiography for my 17th birthday, to tell me that she found an online bookstore with a clearance sale, asking me to check if there was anything I might like––Dostoevsky’s The Double and Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day.
When we were children my mother never bought us books, but she did take us to the library every week. The other day as I was on my way out to get some air, she kept asking, “are you going to the library?”, knowing that I rarely went out to anywhere else. The second time she asked this, I replied in annoyance that I wasn’t. “Okay,” she acquiesced, “because if you were, I could’ve lent you my library card.”
Some days it is easier to let go of these things than others. Last month when someone offered to buy my copy of Kieślowski’s Three Colours trilogy, I held it in my hands and replied, sorry, I have decided not to sell it. This afternoon I sold it to one eager buyer along with Taxi Driver, First Reformed, Lost in Translation and Vertigo. These weren’t too hard to sell––I had bought them for myself, and so they were only artefacts of an outdated characterisation of myself, a passing phase.
The memory of my friends is divorced from these rectangles on a Zoom call, the only setting in which these memories are resurrected in the present––bodies preserved only from the shoulders up. Perhaps they were preserved as large, colourful squares on my wall that I called an identity. My bookshelf is thinning out. My wall is gradually being uncovered to reveal a stale green, which is bound to be painted over too.
