My fingers land on the shimmery cover of my junior high diary. A literary masterpiece if I do say so myself. Each entry a poignant coming-of-age vignette imbued with deep emotion. Which means I wrote down my moody teenage takes on whatever drama had unfolded that day, and dotted my i’s with hearts. I even worked in a little poetry here and there. Who knew that love/ was a gift from above/ like a hand in a glove/ with no push or no shove? I did, at age thirteen, when I had a crush on a guy named Weasel.

Beneath the diary, there’s a substantial pile of early nineties fashion relics. Skin-tight acid-washed jeans with zippers on the ankles. A pink crimping iron and scads of neon friendship bracelets. The electric purple suede jacket with ridiculously gigantic leather shoulders. I pick up the jacket, and my stomach turns.

The summer before grade nine, I saw it in the window of Rutherfords, the tony ladies’ wear shop in Town. After fifty-nine kilometres’ worth of garbage picking in roadside ditches on a government grant job, I finally had enough money to buy it. For twenty minutes, I preened and twirled and made sassy duck faces in front of the mirror in the store, pretending I’d just stepped out of a music video. When I asked Mama what she thought, she smiled a big broad smile, then started singing “Purple People Eater.” Complete with a little dance. That was the first and nearly the last time I ever swore at my mother. I called her a bitch, threw the jacket on the floor with an angsty flourish, and stormed out.

Mama found me a few minutes later, sitting in the car, where I’d already resolved to blow all the money I’d saved on streel clothes, Doritos, cream soda, and smokes. Which I did. Mama’s underbite pinched her top lip in a vice grip as she got in the car. She didn’t say much. Just this: “Listen here, missy. I brought you into this world. You ever talk to me like that again, and I’ll take you out of it.”

A few months later, I opened my fifteenth birthday gift from Mama. The flying purple people eater suede and leather jacket. I never wore it. Not even once. I try the jacket on for size now. It borders on being too big but is still soft and supple and purple as fuck. Maybe Mama will have me buried in it. She might have to, since I sold all my good clothes on Kijiji before I left Toronto because I needed the cash. And because I’d look stupid wearing that kind of wardrobe around here. And because I probably won’t be around much longer anyway.

Over in another closet corner, there’s the pile of my high school era treasures. By grade ten, my muddy waters ran too deep for original poetry and bubble gum teen magazine fashion. My binders weren’t identified by subject, but rather by the song lyrics scrawled on the covers. The Tragically Hip, for English. Sixties drug tunes, for chemistry. The most cryptic and depressing things Tori Amos ever wrote, for math. There’s baggy jeans with ripped knees. Plaid shirts. A pair of busted-up red suede Converse One Stars, like the ones Kurt Cobain died in. Bought them with the tips I made waiting tables one summer. Mama gave me the gears for wasting money on something as foolish as a pair of brand name sneakers, when they sold ones “just like them” for ten bucks at the Bargain Store. I made a point of wearing them right to death. Maybe I’ll be buried in them, too. They’ll go great with the purple people eater jacket.