Boxes

Boxes - you know, those things that you need all the time to put things in to keep them from being mixed in with other things - to separate for the appropriate time or place or use.  Sometimes those boxes are used to put things away that you never want to see again, but for some reason, you can't let go of.

I don't understand, yet I am the biggest practitioner of the art.  Go through my house, my desk - my mind - and you will find boxes - cardboard boxes, cigar boxes, nice wooden ones that look like decorations, every kind imaginable.  No, I'm not talking about an episode of Hoarders here.  But everywhere you dig around there are boxes holding little bits of my life, my dreams - realized and lost - and I guess, if truth be told and the soul really exists - my soul is in them as well.

I have thought many times that somehow you can just burn the boxes and be done with all the clutter, but the problem is the true clutter - the soul clutter - survives all burning, discarding - any and all attempts to remove them.  So here I am with the awful clutter of a journey stretching across and into seven different decades now....

And there is some significant stuff in those boxes - horrifying deaths of friends and family, even some that "made the papers" - one even made into several movies; sadness and pain, often self-inflicted, in attempts to escape pain that came before; glories that fell flat in the end, becoming more painful than if there had been no glory at all; and then there are the "sins."

I don't believe in sin in the religious sense.  First, I am pretty doubtful about a god, or "God" as we are so often required to spell it.  On a side note, I don't think god, if any, would give a crap about capitalizing my name, so fair is fair.  And I don't think that any supernatural being could punish me anyway close to what I do to myself right here.  But as far as sin goes, it is a very neat word for the nasty shit we do almost everyday that fills the boxes - it is the lies, black and white and the worst are the ones we tell ourselves; it is the little and big things we do to get by - financially, socially - the whole shooting match; the disappointments we suffer and can't share with anyone - at least I have never learned to share - that pile the boxes higher and deeper...

To become your fortress and your tomb.

There are no answers here, not even any questions.  I guess they all just continue to stack up until you finally put them in one final box and lay down beside them forever...

Nice outside, huh?