Black Box

It is rare to find permanence these days. People are constantly coming and going, starting and ending, loving and losing. It is even rarer, it seems, for there to be answers of why going and ending and losing must happen at all. Of course, sometimes it’s a good thing, but I feel like having some closure would make the ending a little less painful. I wish I could know the minute it happened, when I reached the defining moment…When I lost. Because saying goodbye always feels like losing for me. But since life does not like to inform me of its plans, I move on and carry those questions of “why” and “how” with me everywhere I go.

This weekend I am moving to a new apartment, a new home in a string of many across the years. During these moves, those lingering questions seem to come to my mind more during transition periods than any other time in my life. Each box I pack, each item I store, brings me closer to another chapter ending, another goodbye. One box, in particular, that I have is a black one that I have been carrying around with me for about ten years now. And not long after I bought it, I lost the keys. Each time I move, this box goes with me from apartment to house to apartment, year after year. To explain its origin a little better, it is a small safe that I bought at a time before I was old enough to open a checking account. I wanted to protect my small allowance and the meager wages I would get for teaching piano each week. I don’t believe there’s anything too valuable in it anymore, since I would assume that I would have been more determined to open it back then had there been money still in it at the time the keys vanished. I’ve kept it all this time just in case, telling myself that I’ll get around to figuring out how to open it someday. It’s a small but very heavy box that frustrates me more and more with each move, and promises are always created to make opening it more of a priority so I can be done with the thing. It’s seems a pointless piece of weighted mystery of which I can’t seem to let go. Even if I wanted to dispose of it, I am not sure where I would recycle or donate it, since it has no key and I have no idea what is inside of it. I don’t want to take the risk of tossing it when there is a chance it contains something valuable.

Each time I move I see this box that has been a spectator through so much of my life and feel a tinge of resentment. It has been an eavesdropper to all of my late night phone calls, my private rants to myself, midnight tear fests. It has heard the hurtful words I regret and the apologies I have thrown over the wounds I’ve caused. It has seen my heart break while on the receiving end of hurtful words and deep cuts. It has been a bystander, sitting on the shelf and seeming to bide its time, waiting for me to remember it. Sometimes I wonder if what’s hiding beneath its contents is something I’ve been looking for all these years. Perhaps it has seen so much of my life that it could tell me where things went wrong. Perhaps that is why it has waited so patiently all this time. It’s been silently collecting conversation across my life that if only I could find the keys, I could figure out what it was that caused the crash of so many of my hopes and so much of what I held dear. Maybe it could tell me why life chose me to hurt in such ways. Perhaps this black box has been the hiding place of answers to all those questions I’ve carried around with it from home to home (but never really a home), questions of why and where my life seemed to fall apart.

So each time I pack, I go through my bags and drawers hoping I will find the keys to this black box of mine. But at the same time, I’m much too afraid to find them. And perhaps that is why I haven’t tried too hard to get it open over the years. Because the thought of this box being as empty as I sometimes feel, that would be unbearable. I would rather leave it as it is, an untapped potential of hope. So I look at it sometimes and wonder what is in it as I throw it in among my moving boxes. Maybe it will have the answers, maybe it contains what a young girl once held dear to her heart and needed to protect, or maybe …maybe it just contains dark and empty space.