lost and found

"did you ever find my digital camera?" my ex asked me numerous times after our breakup. To which I invariably responded "NO".

Sometimes I responded testily. Sometimes I was even very nasty about it. I was annoyed that he persisted in thinking I knew where his camera was. I had been very good about not trashing his shit, about not hanging onto trophies or whathaveyou. As much as it sucked, I made the effort to maturely and discretely return all of his crap as I found it. Maturely and discretely mean I grouped stuff together and left it for him in the department, rather than using each new find as an excuse to call him with harassing requests to come over to pick them up, or with screeching psycho threats to set fire to it all on his family's lawn.

Admittedly, a few things remain in a box in the trunk of my car, mostly stuff he gave to me or pictures of him and/or his family that I have no need for. I hadn't seen his camera during the miserable months long process of finding his shit mixed in with mine. Moreover, I was quite sure there was no reason it would have ever been at the apartment I moved to after we split up in June of 05. The breakup had been coming all spring of 05, at least that long. As I recalled, we hadn't exactly been filling up the hard drives with snapshots of this happy time, (although it turns out there were a few, some of which at this point count as nearly amusingly horrid).

Further, he was barely around once we moved apart in June of 05 - him to rush off months in advance to move closer to his 30 miles from campus crappy nontenure track one year lecturer appointment at a satellite campus while he finished his dissertation and me to move into the shitty but what counted for affordable near campus little rat trap apartment while I tried to get this last chapter of grad school underway.

So why the fuck would his camera be at my place? And more to the point, why the fuck should I know where he dropped all the things that were important to him in his rush to get his dissertation hand stamp which he believed would give him unfettered access to fully competent adulthood-world?

"It's probably in some family member's car" I had snapped at him the last time he asked. In July, we had that last big fight. You know the one, the one you've had over and over but this time you see just how far apart you are and you are so TIRED of trying to fix it that you are crying just from sheer exhaustion. We decided to give it "a break", at least while he worked on his latest draft of his dissertation. During that time, he took off for the beach with his family. Had he come back, finished up, and had anything remotely eloquent to say to me on his return, things might have gone differently. He didn't. He did happen to mention he had gone to Boston to visit the art museum with "a friend" (whom he later exchanged promise rings with - that's right, during our "break" for him to work on his dissertation he was instead taking trips with his family and hanging out with "ass like an ibook" friend).

That pretty much cemented the breakup.

So here we are, well over a year later, and what has turned up in my most recent move? That's right. It's his camera. I found it the last day of my move.

The battery was dead but it turns out my lovely new laptop has a reader for the memory card. Presto, there they were. Some quite nice pictures I had taken with his camera during the Spring of 2005, before the move, before the breakup.

I took off all the pictures I wanted and left him with the pretty nature pictures he can tell his family he took (he'd done this in the past) and pictures of himself, since that will be important to him, to ibook ass lady, and to his family. I also left on this one of me since I do of course plan to return the camera.