Shreds

Filing charts, I shuffle through drawers, nestling folders into hanging files.

Amongst the regulars are some whom I haven’t seen in a while, a year or much more,

and one I fired for failing to show up for three consecutive appointments. 

Today I am graced with the time to leaf through and weed out aging documents,

glancing inside at the last date to ensure it is at least a lucky seven years ago. 

I extract one, two, three ex-husbands of women who remain in the active file.

I remove those who have moved, or simply moved on.

The pile rises on the floor next to where I kneel,

reverently paging through, recalling names, faces, maladies.

Or not recalling often enough,

squinting at the name, and chart notes, asking ‘who are you?’

Then, there are the dead:

My 98-year-old lady with a closet full of hats;

Another who would now be 106, but is likely not coming back;

The sudden car accident on a rainy January night;

A man who did not know he had pancreatic cancer,

but died on a Sunday between his Thursday and Tuesday appointments;

The doctor murdered in a cemetery when a drug deal went bad.

I gut the file folders for re-use and feed the loose pages into a shredder.

The sheets tremble as they vanish into the narrow slot.

There is a melancholy tug at the part of me that wishes to preserve them

but I persevere, knowing the cyclical nature of things,

ritually recalling the vanishing names that now make space for the new. 

The rumble of the mechanism is jarring and violent.

It slows and deepens for the body of each slim sheaf,

grinding up the evidence of the fragile lives that have passed under my hands,

people whom I have literally touched.

I skim the notes as they hasten toward destruction

picking out phrases unique to each case,

remembering them even as they are dismembered.

In this way I honor them, treat them all equally,

recollect and validate, recall and confirm their existence.

As the repository fills with their debris, I remove and empty the bin.

Here I am delighted to reach into the basket,

sift through once more with my hands,

lift the paper shavings and watch them fall back to the earth

rendering each one into a celebratory handful of confetti.

~Andrine de la Rocha, LMT

  November 2012