I bought the guitar when I was in high school (or just after). Bright red and electric, it was curvy, smooth, and shiny. It looked fast. My friend was a guitarist – self-taught and quite good. He made playing the guitar look easy. He had a natural gift and pursued it with dogged determination. I had no such gift. Aside from a few lessons here and there, I never really learned to play. My fingers seldom did what my mind wanted them to do. I hit more sour and deadened notes than I did clean ones.
At one point, the input jack on the guitar came loose. I took it apart and studied the insides – a wire had frayed and needed to be soldered. I kept the screws, the back plate, and the whammy bar in an envelope hoping I would one day get around to fixing it.
A few years ago I bought new strings, new picks, and an electronic tuner. I practiced for a little bit – acoustic style because the jack had never been fixed. I bought a wall hanger and hung the guitar in my bedroom – still bright red, curvy, and smooth. When I moved, I took the guitar with me. When I moved again, I took it with me again.
Today, I put the guitar in the trash. The input jack still missing. The strings still attached but out of tune. Still bright. Still red. Still curvy-smooth and looking fast.
For almost thirty years, the guitar has represented the things I might one-day get to. For almost thirty years, the guitar represented the most mild of my ambitions: first in eventually, some day, maybe learning to play, and then in my desire to fix it. I never got around to either of those things and this weekend as I cleaned out some of my stuff, I came face to face with the mildly unpleasant reality that I’ll probably never learn to play the guitar. Sure, there’s plenty of time left in life to learn. Part of me thinks it would be good to learn something new – just like part of me liked the idea of learning how to repair the guitar.
I used to work in an academic bookstore. I bought a lot of books – I read some of them. I had a co-worker, an older woman with wild and wiry hair who was writing a sci-fi novel, who once said she buys books so as to lessen the obligation of reading them. Like my guitar, my book collection (which is also getting thinned) has moved with me from place to place. Like my guitar, my book collection represents the person I think I am, the person I wish to be, and the person I often feel I might retreat to in my more solitary moments. The many books I haven’t read represent a better future version of myself, an aspirational version of myself.
For me, getting rid of things can be hard. Sometimes, I’ve attached emotional memories to the things (my plants, some photos, and special objects). Sometimes, I get caught up in the utility of the object – I tend to think, “it still works fine someone else should get some use out of it.” But sometimes, I have to acknowledge that these things are also somehow representative of who I am: a music lover, a reader, a person who sometimes enjoys the solitary practice of learning. Beyond the utilitarian and the sentimental, getting rid of things is a little like slicing off parts of my future (or aspirational) self.
And then I remind myself I can always buy more books or another guitar – and maybe then I’ll be more ready for them.