Me Three

Box in the Closet

By Sarah Stodola

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When Genie left today, everything was calm. I looked around the rooms of my apartment and noticed with misguided surprise that everything was in place. Nothing was shaking or falling off the shelves. The earthquake was in my head. I hesitated to move, to breathe in more air than was absolutely necessary. I wonder what sense it is in us which informs us that This time, she’s not coming back. She didn’t even say goodbye when she walked out the door. She couldn’t get out fast enough, and speaking would have slowed her down.

There’s a box I keep hidden in my closet. Not so hidden, maybe, since anyone who really wanted to could find it. But since I’m the only one who knows it’s there, I doubt it will ever happen. I keep things in this box which mean a lot to me, and it would horrify me to find that another person had been enlightened as to their existence. There are a couple of love letters I never sent, there’s a picture I took out my window of this couple who always fought and made up on the street below my window. There’s my list of things I want to do in life. There's a pile of random scribblings - thoughts, ideas, concerns. There’s my emergency weed – not the weed I usually have around for friends and social occasions. The weed in the box is there for the times when the regular weed is gone and I am alone in the apartment and broke and I really want to get stoned. This will probably be more often now that Genie is gone, and I need to remember to restock. There’s a card that Genie gave me, why I don’t know, that her Dad gave to her when she was a kid. Maybe she just didn’t want the reminder anymore but couldn’t bring herself to throw it away. Genie did a lot of things I didn’t understand.

There’s a lot of stuff in the box, some worth mentioning, some not. It’s almost full and before long I believe I am going to be forced to create a sibling for it. This very story will probably go in the box after I finish it. On the outside of the box, in big bold letters, I have labeled the box TAX RETURN CRAP. I figure this way no one will ever be curious to take a peek inside.

Once it became irrevocably clear to me that by this time Genie was in a cab headed for someplace she would not be telling me about, I went into my bedroom and retrieved the box. I often do this when I’m upset – even if I don’t want the weed. The box comforts me. Perhaps it’s simply nice for me to see physical evidence of who I am, and to know that these are the parts of me that no one can mess with. Or maybe I just like the self-indulgence of it. Regardless, I spent a couple of hours going through the contents of the box, vaguely wondering if I should have shared them with Genie, if that would have made any difference. I hadn’t intended to smoke the weed, but I did anyway. I reread the old love letters and wondered what might have happened if I’d sent them.

I packed another bowl and smoked it before I closed the box and returned it to the closet. Then I laid down on the beige – almost white – carpet and stared at the ceiling. I thought of the contents of the box, how they’re so important to me and so non-existent to everyone else. I wondered if anything can really mean that much if no one else gets to share in its meaning. Kind of like the tree falling and no one there to hear it thing, only even more figurative, and broader in scope. If you live your life in secret, are you really living it? Could Genie have really known me if I never let her see these things which are so essential to me? Maybe that’s why she left, in the end. You can only put up with so much of not knowing someone before it becomes impossible to care about them. I would like to tell her I’m sorry for not sharing these things with her, but how can you apologize to someone for things they don’t know about? It would only disillusion her more.

So I laid on the carpet, looking at the ceiling, stoned, waiting for my appetite to induce me to move toward the kitchen. There was no place else to be, after all, no one to be talking to just then. No concerns, no connections, no failures, no ambitions. Just me, and the floor, and the ceiling, and the box. It was real, but it wasn’t. I said something, I don’t remember what, out loud. No one heard. It got lost, even in my memory.

And then I thought of the whole expanse of America, for some reason, and how many secrets must be contained within it. So many people with so many secrets, and my secrets are probably nothing special, and they would probably surprise - or even interest vaguely - no one. I thought this made keeping them secret even more important. Their secrecy is the only thing that makes them special. And I wondered would the world be a better place or a worse one if everyone shared all of these deepest secrets with everyone else.

And then the appetite did kick in. I’m usually in the class of people who lose their appetite when they’re upset. Only it's worse than just losing the appetite, it’s a physical inability to eat. Usually, if there’s something delicious in front of us, we can eat it whether we’re hungry or not. When I am deeply upset, my stomach tightens and even my favorite foods can't loosen it up. In that sense, my emergency stash of weed may have kept me from wasting away on more than a couple of occasions.

I went straight for the junk food. Oreos, Doritos, and I made a cheese burrito in the microwave. And I kept contemplating that box in the closet, my own personal Pandora’s Box. And I wondered what would happen if I did let the contents out. And if I did, would Genie have suddenly understood everything that I hadn’t ever figured out a way to express. And I thought how this is just one more example of how there are some things we can't ever know, even in hindsight.

I knew that either way that box would remain in the closet until my dying day. Perhaps I should draw up a last will and testament for the sole purpose of ensuring that no one examines the contents of the box, even after I’m gone. The thought of someone seeing this stuff, ever, even after I’m not here to care about it one way or the other, terrifies me. It’s almost enough to make me destroy everything in it.

But then I thought about it again, and I knew that if I did something so drastic as that, I would be destroying the only tangible evidence of the total and complete me I ever had. And I couldn't ever do that, especially not to spare myself some posthumous embarrassment.

And besides, I need that box. Right where it is. After all, I held onto it tighter than I held onto Genie.

I guess I’ve staked my claim.

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Sarah Stodola is the Managing Editor of Me Three. She can be contacted at sstodola@methree.net.