A Sleepy Girl's Thoughts on Life

My Life in a Box

I remember that cool fall day a year ago. It was a weekday, but I wasn't at work, which means it must have been Columbus Day, or maybe Veteran's Day. It was a little like today, deceivingly sunny and chirpy, with that sneaky chill in the air. And the leaves were turning, the orange ones blowing around past my windshield.

I had a mission that day.

A mission to completely pack up my life as I knew it and cart it all back to that place where I came from. I was going back to my roots--my parents, my childhood home--and I was going to do it as quickly as possible.

I stopped at the storage place along the way hoping to find some packing material for my fragile dishes. I walked in, all disheveled and wind-blown in my lazy pants and sweatshirt, and I remember thinking how strange this all was.

I remember wishing that I didn't have to do this alone. Thinking how nice it would've been to have him help me this one last time. How nice it would be if he could just go and do everything for me. He would have known better than I where to find packing stuff, after all...heck, I don't even know the technical term for "packing stuff."

But not surprisingly, I found it anyway. I bought some big sheets of brown paper that were lying around the store, and triumphantly hauled them inside to my cozy, now half-empty apartment. I walked in and felt the stale warmth of the sun coming in through the huge balcony window. The place had already taken on such a feeling of emptiness, of impermanence.

It used to be a place of love. Friendship. Hope and future. Now it was just a meaningless space surrounded by walls, filled with piles of random things. Picture frames, dishes, tools. I separated them all out.

His pile. My pile. His pile. My pile.

We used to share everything. Now we shared nothing.

I got out my new packing material and my boxes, and I started to pile things in. At first I was methodical, labeling each box based on its contents: Kitchen, Bed sheets, Books.

But my organizational scheme soon gave way to chaos, and box after box got a perhaps more appropriate label: Misc. The Misc. boxes held everything and anything: picture frames, misfit articles of clothing, a shoe here, a shoe there, my pretty blue shower curtain.

I finished in a few hours, lining up all of my boxes by the door. And there they were, all of my important life posessions, dumped into brown stiff cardboard, in a place that I would never call home again.

I made sure to neatly pile his things in another part of the room. I gave one long look back, taking in the desolate expanse, and I walked out the door.

A week or so later, my boxes and I were home. I unpacked only what I needed, which, again unsurprisingly, wasn't much.

And the rest of the boxes, I left in the basement. The cold, dust-filled basement. I'd come down every once in a while to get an erstwhile item or two, but for the most part those boxes just sat there. Shelved away in my life and in my mind. Memories pushed aside so I could start over again.

Until yesterday.

Yesterday, in an effort to clean up the atrocious packing job I had done a year earlier, my mom went through those boxes. She unpacked and re-packed and threw out, unaware of the sentimentality of that act.

The undoing of what had become permanence for me. The stirring of old memories.

She asked me to venture down and go through some of the mess. She wanted to know what could go and what could stay.

I obliged. And there they were. The infamous Misc. boxes. Still filled with my random crap.

I picked up a picture frame, laying down on its face, and for a moment everything came flooding back. I could see the apartment. I could see this picture of us in the apartment. Sitting on my white bookcase in our bedroom, front and center. It was quite possibly the best picture of us ever taken. I'd had it blown up to 5x7 to fit the frame, a pretty gold one with swirls of green and bronze around it.

I didn't know what to do.

I set the frame down as I looked around at everything else. Another picture of us in a different frame--one that in fact I had given him (somehow I ended up with it). And then another. And then the little toolsets he bought for me just so I'd have them. The air purifier that he bought for our room.

"Well, what do you expect?" my mom said, noticing my perplexed expression. "He was your life, Lauren."

And then I knew what to do.

She was right. He was my life.

But not anymore.

I opened the frame, and I tried to take the picture out. The funny thing is, it was stuck. Somehow water had gotton inside, and the picture was literally fused to the glass. I couldn't take it out without ripping and ruining it.

I tried peeling the picture off slowly, hoping to maybe salvage it, or at least salvage the frame glass. But it didn't take. So I ripped hard, and part of the picture ended up stuck on the glass.

I held the curling picture in my hand, our smiling faces still intact, and I couldn't help but feel the irony of the situation, the figurative metaphor for our relationship and the way it ended.

I gave the frame to my mom, who was very excited that she'd have another item to put in her garage sale pile.

"What about this?" she asked, pointing to the ruined photo. "Should I throw it away?"

"Yeah," I said. It came out easier than I thought it would.

Because the damage had already been done. It was the original rip off the glass that hurt just a little bit. And the real rip the year before that hurt a lot.

I know my memories will never really leave me. I know I'll always have things that remind me of him. But I also know that I'm happy now, and that I'll be happy in the future. I know that I can go to the store and come back with all the "packing stuff" I need without lamenting the fact that I don't have a companion.

I have a different life than I had with him. And it's a good one.

I surveyed the now-repacked boxes in the basement, all neatly closed and stacked. All filled with what used to be my life, and again relegated to this dark, lonely little part of our house, and that little corner of my mind.

"Let's go back upstairs," I said to Mom. "I need to go to sleep."

"Okay!" she chirped, happy with the work she'd done.

Without a second thought, she picked up my old photo, crumpled it in her hand, and threw it in with the rest of the trash.

Upstairs we went into the warmth and the light. And I didn't look back.

posted by Sleepy Girl @ 3:27 PM