Losing something or someone is often a shock: blunt and crude, but in this instance the loss is a process the things in the box act as gears in a mechanism cleansing meaning from memory and leaving the ghostly expurgated memory to purposelessly occupy space inside a cardboard coffin.ĭestroying the box is an option but has the feeling of betrayal inked in the small print. The contents of the box now signify a fading connection. Maybe the box only contains the memory of meaning and I am remembering it in the way we remember the dead. But this box has meaning, albeit meaning that somehow feels late both after the event and dead.
An unpacked box would be empty, hollow and by association, meaningless. But the box is the opposite of unpacked in both senses of the word its contents are steadfastly unremoved and its individual component parts distinctly unanalysed. I think of the box as the ‘unpacked’ box, the ‘un’ prefix suggesting, perhaps, something lacking: unopened, uncertain, unfulfilled. So it sits in a box’s natural habitat in the shade, out of sight, hidden behind the sofa – unopened and undealt with after a year of living alone. We weren’t married but it feels like I won the box in the divorce settlement and now have a responsibility to keep it safe. Things that once were part of our shared experience, each one a scrap of happiness, had overnight deadened into souvenirs. When my now ex-partner and I split up and moved into separate flats, she couldn’t face living with the box and what it signified. For years it moved with me and my partner from flat to flat, accumulating a little more in weight each year as we collected little notes, Valentine’s Day cards, gig tickets, plane tickets and anything else that reminds a couple of a shared life.
It’s a square brown box – one of those used for moving to a new house, ‘memories’ scrawled on one side in black ink.
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