This box I’m keeping
I sat down to write about boxes
I sat down to write about happy boxes
I don’t know if I know any
But I know humans like boxes
I know we’re hoarders
We try to keep everything
Clothes, shoes, innocence, and dead bodies too
We think if we put things away
we might save them from time
We started making them out of plastic
Out of metal
Enticing us into false preservation
We hide pieces of ourselves away
We live in boxes to protect ourselves from the strangeness of the world
While our boxes make the world all the more strange
What’s in a box?
Everything unnatural
Everything alien
The square is a terrifying shape
The building block of our lives
And we see it repeated in a dozen
brown amazon boxes
I’m not sure we ever need
The more one has the more one wants
I saw them when I moved here
In the basements
In the attics
In the hospitals, stores, post offices
When I packed up my home
Keeping everything but the one thing I wanted
The person who left
My favorite boxes have a christmas star and some ballet slippers
Another full of cards and sketches
One for mom’s art and one for dad’s
And One for mine
Three for the plates and dishes I’ll never use
Two for the little girl’s room I’ll never have
And one for me
I keep it in my desk
It’s full of notes
The ones that make me feel better
My dreams, I think
My hopes, My wishes
The quiet spaces I left
The words, I kept
And the hurts that don’t seem to stop hurting
A little bird that sings
And the memory of the little girl that used to bring
Flowers to her mother
The little girl used to draw small cards
She used to play in her backyard
She prays now for softness
For the peace that never came
It’s safe now
But she can’t leave
She doesn’t know how
So she stays in her little box
With her colored rocks
She’s waiting
For what, she’s not sure
But it’s not so bad
She’s not always sad
Just sometimes
Just in the mornings
And the nights
When she remembers grass
When the noises long passed
Echo dissonant tunes
Like the brushing of a broom
A sink
The heels down the hallway
The screams
The laughter
And all the worst bits that came after
The truth is
Boxes remind me of a myth I learned too soon
And the memories that lock me in my room
Boxes hope to grasp the intangible
It’s a tragedy
A desperate grueling failure
And an unbreakable habit for all