Why was this so difficult? Why were my hands shaking?
I paused as I clumsily pawed at the tiny padlock, securing a box of memories that for all intents and purposes, shouldn’t even be locked. Nobody would want in there. Nobody would even care. But I had had it locked for years nonetheless.
In frustration, I grabbed the brass handles and carried the decades-old wooden time capsule and hauled it over to the desk. My hands fumbled with the keys and the lock, like some teenaged lover trying to work his way past the bonds of his love’s white-plastic belt in the back of a steamy, cliff-perched muscle-car.
Too much caffeine? Was that why I was shaking?
That was a cop-out, and I knew it. On my bed set a collection of memory on paper, all dusty and beginning to show the age they had accumulated through the wear and tear of mental disregard. But inside the box…
The key finally turned, straining against cheap construction and shoddy materials inside a ยข20 mish-mash of metal and plastic. The latch released, the restraining bar sprang open, and the contents were ready to be revealed.
I slipped the lock out of the latch, and finally opened the lid, ready for a flood of memories to come pouring out as though Pandora herself had originally sealed the latch against time.
Nothing but a bunch of papers and dusty, cheap memories.
Why was this so difficult? Why was I straining so?
The notebooks and writings lying unassuming on my bed had been easier to get to. They were hibernating in one of those ubiquotous brown envelopes that are dispersed en masse in grade school, to young students who are told to look back on what they’ve done ten years from then in an embarrassing expose of personal growth and maturation.
It had been more than 10 years for many of them. Their cicada-like cacooning had finally resulted in their exposure to daylight after almost 17 years of forgetful burial in the deepness of the back of a poorly organized closet.
The box sat there on my lap, unmoving, awaiting my decision as it had done for years, as the dam of time and instant gratification had slowly been erected to stop it’s constant agitation. A pool of quiet, aggregated years had pooled and swirled, waiting for the box to open, the dam to break. Quietly counting down the days until it’s neatly bundled life were to be ressurected in the shower of memory, the box retained a river of remembrance, wanted or unwanted, but all true, and all life.
I reached inside…
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[…] pass, nothing even emanates from our eyes, and meanwhile, deep inside, we’re waiting for the dam to break. Posted in Philosophy on Saturday, November 10th, […]