Inside The Boxes

I didn't believe it then, and (quick math: 2006-1994 = 12) twelve years later, I'm still not so sure I believe it. Moving away, moving on makes you stronger.

You’ll see. You’ll change. I wasn’t ready to swallow that as a seventeen-year old watching everyone she knew disperse into different regions of the country. And of course, inevitably, I changed. But while I assume that people change in prison, too, does that make it an experience everyone should go through?

Too many losses later, too many movings on for the sake of – of what? of moving on? – I am very aware that I have changed and, yes, grown. But how many times is it necessary to move sideways before you stop adding and filling in pieces of yourself and you begin leaving too many behind, some of them falling away without your even noticing them?

One October I packed up my things and moved myself to San Francisco because I needed to escape problems that were too large for me to grasp. I thought I could fold them neatly into a box and tie it up tightly and hop on the Southwest Airlines Providence-Baltimore-Kansas City-Oakland flight and that the box would stay put where I had left it. Six months later, I realized that my problems had done some escaping of their own, that they had left the box and I had unknowingly carried them with me until they eventually seeped so deeply into my mind that all I could see was gray.

I begin 2006 happy and content, independent and yes, strong. But I am also beginning to wonder about all of those pieces of me that have stayed behind in boxes. Last weekend, visiting my childhood home, I stood on a chair to reach the top shelf of my closet and grabbed one of the shoeboxes that are filled with letters from people I have loved, people who evidently at some point loved me enough to write me letters. Sitting cross-legged on the floor of my old room, I re-read years and years worth of letters that had not been touched since I'd opened them for the first time. I laughed, I cried, and I remembered a whole lot of great times and people who have been pieces of me. Who have helped me to be who I am now. And I desperately miss some of those people.

For some reason this year I am ready to start filling in those pieces. Most likely many of them won’t fit anymore, and that’s fine, because the only risk in reaching out is finding that out – I mean, for all intents and purposes they’re already gone in body anyway. And if I find even one of my missing pieces to be open, receptive, and perhaps even searching for their own missing pieces, and if our pieces still fit our changed versions of ourselves, then that will, to me, be a beautiful thing.