I Found the Old Me Carefully Preserved in a Box in My Closet
A box of memories, a lifetime of grief
There’s a storm outside that nearly mirrors the one happening inside of me. I don’t know why I did it, but I found myself sitting in my closet with a box I’ve kept since high school. All the letters I’ve received from friends over the years are tucked carefully inside. Letters to friends I met at camp. Letters to church friends. Letters to school friends and family friends and relatives who were more like friends. Letters to lovers. The history of my youth is there in carefully penned script and pressed flowers.
But I keep flipping through the cards in frustration because not one of them is the one I want to find. I was hoping that somewhere, between the pages of this treasure trove of memory, would be a birthday card from my grandmother. She sent one every year until I turned 30. She usually slipped a check for $25 inside. When she sent more, she asked me not to tell. And I never did — not until now. But for all those years of cards, I don’t seem to have kept a single one.
I wonder how that’s possible as the person who has perpetually held on to everything and everyone in a desperate attempt to stop time and love people as hard as I can while I can. My existential crisis is tucked into a single box, and yet there’s not a single card in her writing I can hold. I can’t explain why I need it now — only that I do.
I know that she loved me. I don’t need to see it written down for proof. I have so many cherished memories to hold. But one day, I might follow in the footsteps of both of my grandmothers before me and lose them to dementia, and there won’t even be a card left behind.
I sit on the floor with the storm growing outside and feel the growing grief. It’s never gone, but sometimes, I think it’s easier to cry for what is lost than to cry for all the hard things in my life now. It’s easier to sit in a closet and weep for all the lost birthday cards than to weep because I’m lonely, struggling, and finding parenting a constant uphill battle that I’m tasked to do largely alone. Am I upset about lost cards I haven’t thought of in years, or am I upset because life is overwhelming, and I don’t feel free to cry for myself?
I place the letters and cards back into the box. I see names I haven’t thought of in years, and they bring vague faces to mind. The girls I met at camp and eventually lost touch with. The childhood friends who’ve gone their own way. The boyfriends who would become ex-boyfriends. The best friend who ghosted me but remains both my first love and my first and worst broken heart. I could read them — maybe one day I will read them — but I remember so vividly what it was to be her that I don’t need to right now.
Instead, I sit with what’s beneath the surface. I want to cry for the years of birthday cards I took so much for granted that I didn’t bother to save them. I want to weep for the birthday cards that will never come. I want to weep for opportunities lost and memories that might one day fade.
But I also want to weep for single parenting and all its inherent loneliness. I want to cry because time is short, and humans are cursed to understand its finite nature. I want to weep for the lover who could not love me in return and the short years of a dog’s life and books I can never read again for the first time.
The storm outside is darker, but the rain is steady now. It’s no longer pounding the ground in anger or trying to drown my plants in grief. It came all of a sudden, and it will leave that way, too. I pack the box away, carefully preserving the memories. I am grieving, but I am grateful. I turn off the lights and shut the closet door.
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