Sometimes, I think about what I left behind to move to the US.
I mean that in a literal way, instead of a metaphorical one. I’ve been thinking about the physical possessions I left behind a bunch lately, in part because I’ve been re-buying some of them from eBay across the past year or so. Not in any kind of organized, “I’m rebuilding my comic and book collection and this is my plan,” way; it is, as is my tradition, far more haphazard and unintentional than anything like that. I think we’d all expect no less.
I’m not buying everything over again, thankfully; there were no shortage of books, records, comics, and whatever I once owned that I have little desire to revisit in the slightest, never mind re-purchase. (Just remembering the tower of Empire magazines I had gives me no shortage of anxiety, as much as I long for the days of longform entertainment magazine writing.) But as I grow older and think about the mass of media that I didn’t just live through but were a fan of, I find myself wishing that I hadn’t left basically everything I’d known entirely behind when I moved continents. Couldn’t I have had a plan to keep things in storage and move them eventually…? I had a near-complete run of Deadline, for God’s sake. Do you know how expensive that kind of thing is to buy nowadays?
I left it all behind to start anew, under the impression that I wouldn’t want or need much or all of it. Looking back now, that feels like an early warning sign of how that relationship would turn out — the suggestion (as was the case for many years) that I limit any comic or book collection because it wasn’t important enough to make space for, and there were more important things to focus on.
I guess we ended on the metaphor after all; I left parts of me behind when I left all those stories and magazines and books and pages of other people’s words. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I should have been paying attention to why I was doing it, and what it would mean, years down the line.
Or maybe I’m just bitter at the price of Green Lantern Corps #201, all these years later.