There are boxes about myself. Boxes of letters, notes, bad poems and long ago found quotes, forgotten boxes that are slipped under other boxes, and between nooks and crannies and overloaded shelves. Boxes of plastic, boxes of cardboard, boxes of polished wood with scratched love memos and suitcases filled with messages from people both living and dead. These boxes make me, and yet they don’t. They explain to me the past, foretell of the future, but mostly they sit mum most the time, not sure they’ve yet sorted through all themselves. But as I forget and forget, those boxes remember and remember, and as I lose more and more, so they gain and gain, their seams taut and bellies full. I’m a collector, I guess, not because I can’t bear to throw anything away but rather because I can not stand the thought of forgetting something important, or perhaps anything at all. So a lot of junk gets collected, and a lot of things go missing.

But, once a blue moon, when I’m in need of a good seek, so I find items and curios and people whose faces slipped so many years before, and yet, so they come back, as vivid as morning and night. I wonder, just how much stuff is in a life?

I read to myself a poem. A poem I wrote in fifth grade. It says:

Choose the beginning of the end/Whenever that might be/And remember that the ground crumbles/You can never go back.

I smile now, just a little one. I can not help but think, oh dearly kid, how very wrong you were.