Bring the Packing Tape

Boxes.

Pack one up and tape the other.

Boxes.

Boxes. I’ve seen too many in my lifetime. I’ve watched as they invade my room and eat my possessions. Every three years, a box I have to pack up and move on. Friends don’t fit in boxes.

I sit down on a hard seat on yet another plane. It smells. My eyes are scratchy. (But can I really itch my eyes?) While I think about the realities of scratching my eyes, the man next to me elbows me in the ribs. I wince and my ears perk up, waiting for an apology. None comes. All I can hear are the boxes rustling under me in the bowels of the plane.

Once I get to the new place, the boxes sit there for weeks. Maybe months. I don’t want to unpack, afraid that I’ll just have to pack up again as soon as I set my stuff down in its new home.

Boxes are my life. Cardboard makes my heart rate increase, beating inside the wall of my chest, bruising it. The cardboard makes up the boxes that carry my memories. These flimsy pieces of cardboard hold together my life.

As I unpack yet another one on the new floor, of my new home, in my new state, in my new country, I stop. A box full of paper. To an ordinary eye it would seem irrelevant. Fuel for a fire on a cold night. But there in the boxes are words. Words from people that seem more distant than a few hundred or thousand miles. Those words have been bled by owners who felt their own pain as I packed my boxes. I suddenly feel guilty, as my inward self realizes that more inward selves have been hurting. I pick up a page written in ink. Ink that cannot be removed. No matter what happens, those words have become a history of my relationships, before the boxes were around. Before the boxes threatened joy and pleasure.

I sit down and read these words, engulfing their meaning and their significance. As my eyes trace over the last lines I hear a click. A click of copper clockwork in my solid heart that has hardened at the touch of rough cardboard. I look up at the box of papers. The boxes in the rest of the room.

These boxes have captured heartache. Questioning. Grief. Struggles. Misery. Helplessness rage weakness blame fault wonder crazefrenzyindignationhelphelphelpaslkdfjaslkj…

But they have also opened me to opportunity. Travel. Wisdom. Maturity. Growth. Awareness. Sensitivity. Laughter. Love.

And people.