Every now and then, I used to open a blue iron trunk, examine its contents one by one, throw some away and put most back in.
Letters, often chronologically arranged. Some of my own- never posted. Greeting cards. Some of them, handmade. I haven’t written letters or sent cards for a long time now. Movie tickets, with a little note on the backside- about the film or who I saw it with. Stuff friends had scribbled on my notebooks during class. A school project. Even an answer script, I topped, you see. School Magazines with some of my stuff in. And photographs too. A feather. A bark of the tree that has long been chopped off. A stone with a few words inked in, they have blurred now. The script of a play I was part of. A school momento, I wonder why I didn’t throw it. I despised both- the school and the momento- it is the ugliest possible. Even an autograph book. Poems, well that’s what I called them. Tucked into a diary I started over 15 years ago. I kept at it regularly for just over a year, but kept ‘re-starting’ it over the years.
I haven’t opened that trunk in two years now. Its lies in the attic of my parents house. I contemplated moving it to my house. But I didn’t. I can still see the contents as I listed them just now. And my life scrolled across. But its better located in that hidden corner. I wouldn’t want to throw anything away. I wouldn’t want to hold any of it as well.
