one incredible gift of being gone and returning to a place you call home is the ability to analyze and re-negotiate your relationship with everything around you. the 4,907 miles between that all-white nordic apartment in Helsinki and my 111-year old arts & crafts house in Portland felt like a long tether between two opposite worlds. and in leaving one for the other, I left a lot of stuff behind, an act of lazy-minimalism and practicality.

a year isn't the longest amount of time, but it is substantial. I often pondered what aspects of myself were rooted in a location, and which parts weren't ("wherever you go, there you are"). ever the variety slut with wanderlust, I used to say I felt the "most me" when I was traveling--out of context with my routines and my familiars, just me, crystalized. but looking back now, that notion has both a naive charm and a fatal flaw: the traveler is always contrasting where they are (or have been) with where they are from. what they are learning with what they know.

over the last year, those rules got fuzzy. when strangers in other countries asked, "where are you from?" I came to reply, most often, "Finland." it was a privilege to disassociate myself from the United States, from 45--though a thing I learned is that you can spot an American every dang time.


when I returned to Portland earlier this summer, one of the things I did was spend a few days going through my attic, where I keep most of my personal effects--photographs, old letters, etc. the act of pulling everything out, handling it to reflect on the origin or history, and putting it all back has long been one of my favorite pastimes. look, I am basically fighting a hoarder's mentality ALL THE DAMN TIME. collecting ephemera, for me, is a perfect cocktail of scarcity/class issues paired with a nostalgic and creative mind. for 30+ years, I've keep things with negligible value because I either want to remember something, or I want to make something new. (tragically [un]related, if you ever need a lifetime supply of bubble wrap, plastic bags, or parcel envelopes, HMU.)

don't even get me started on thrifting/antiquing.


it'd been a year or so, which, in all fairness, isn't the longest time between going through this stuff. but on this particular occasion while shuffling through shoeboxes and storage bins, a couple of highly-insignificant relics of previous lives caught my eye:
-a Behr paint swatch in "Candy Apple" (lime green), the shade I used to paint my living room in my house in Orlando circa 2005 (which I liked so much I used it again in la plantation du paon circa 2009).
-dj roy rovelli's business card (a DJ from London whom I have no memory of meeting, likely in the early 00s)
-a note from high school, passed from a boy I have no memory of saying I seemed "cool" and inviting me to join him at YoungLife for live music sometime
-post-it notes from work projects now obsolete accidentally stuck to the backs of envelopes or flyers

while not noteworthy (in fact, all will likely be thrown out shortly), what I'm trying to get at is a series of items triggering the following nostalgic exercise: thinking about buying that cute little bungalow on E Marks' street; remembering my first trip to the UK when I subsequently lost my passport in Manchester; thinking how relieved I am to no longer have obligatory church time; wondering if X project I worked on years ago will ever be released. in a sense, every tangible item can serve as a memory jog (which is especially useful if you happen to have a shit memory like I do now).

regardless, I have always liked artifacts: the old ticket stubs from shows I barely remember, the whiplash of photobooth strips, finding an old boarding pass or bus ticket in a book. I have a tin of postcards and letters from when I was really into penpals, without which I'd hardly have remembered all my old addresses and friends who (mostly) vanished from my life after the internet entered it. there is a measurable and concrete joy in traveling through time, the timeline of things. I am soothed by the tangibility.

in Tommy Pico's "Junk," he collects all these things in poetry form. reading it, I felt so seen:

It's important to value the Junk, Junk has the best stories...

I can't see exactly where the binder clips begin &
the half used Best Buy gift cards end
Is it that sight is possessive? The way "to see" is also to apprehend? ...

Touching all yr Junk hides it from obscurity Not
wanting to feel absence because absence is grief In her book,
Kondo suggests going thru yr Junk one item at a time, holding
the various "its" and asking does this spark joy Point being: the
Little Mermaid made me a packrat The whittling process A
training program in settling back into yr miracle What remains
criminally un-let-go-of

Don't worry abt Junk It literally doesn't worry about you It can't
Excuse me? I was here on the first date I
am the pin slid thru the boutonniere I am the b&w strip of photo
booth first kiss I am the small stuffed leopard you held all the
way thru the Natural History museum Your time wd mean
nothing without me Nostalgia is the original second life

what you "have" exists in two places: both in your mind and in its physical form. something I struggle with is how to keep the emotional connection to the physical and, if possible, how to harness that spark in a digital form. the honest answer is that I don't need a digital archive of this stuff: sometimes need to handle it; sometimes I need to write about it; sometimes it needs to go in the trash.

did you know nostalgia used to be categorized as a disease / mental illness?

I caught a 2018 film by the same name on my HEL>PDX flight. despite its lousy reviews, I found it an evocative look at legacy, grief, and what we keep. (full disclosure: I like getting airplane-wine drunk and watching sad movies on long international flights, and tend to be forgiving so long as I'm not watching absolute trash.) without spoiling too much, the film asks us to run our heart's worst-case scenarios (a house fire; the death of a loved one) and extrapolate what "matters" and what remains. there is a lot of talk about artifacts. and there is the innuendo of home as both a tangible and conceptual place.

it is an experience of being human that we desire to not be forgotten. perhaps "having" physical items makes that remembrance easier on us all. there will be what you leave behind. there will be grief. there is the anxiety of not knowing: will someone delight finding these things, or will they be bagged up and never sifted through? and ultimately, there is little-to-no opportunity to control the outcome. how we deal with that realization, I suppose, says a bit about who we are, what we pass on, if we breed, etc. legacy. what is a legacy?

to return to the subject line of this tinyletter: even though home is very much about a physical place housing physical goods (relics and memories and also living things like humans and pets and plants), "home" itself is ephemeral. home is more of a feeling than a place. realtors use the rhetoric of "home" instead of "house"--even though they are selling a physical property, they're selling the idea of home, of home-making. my reckoning of the year: all things that pointed to "home" (my attic full of treasures; the city of Portland; my community) were, in a way, more conceptual than they were physical. and yet, in my journey home, part and parcel for me has been the appreciation of my history--the memories and the artifacts.

"nostalgia is the original second life," to quote Tommy Pico. and my junk has the best stories.

xo,
rhienna

postscript: if you like this tiny letter installment, feel free to forward it on to someone you think might enjoy it as well. <3