We box a lot of stuff up in this life. We take surprises and things we’re not sure why we’re keeping and treasured mementos and donations and nestle them against three-dimensional paper structures whose only purpose is to contain such items. We take tape, that which sticks to everything, and seal it tight against the exterior in hopes that the unwrapping cannot be done until the duly appointed time. And then markers or ribbons or bow or fancy colored paper, something to adorn the outside, to remind us of the importance of what’s inside. And then we shove it away, or place it gently in the closet, waiting for the time for it to be opened.
Most gifts are received with joy, or at least some tempered display of enthusiasm. I’ve received no shortage of flak in my life for reacting to unpacking gifts with an obvious reflection of the precise feelings the gift evokes in me, regardless of the expectation of the giver. My commitment to honesty includes not complimenting haircuts and outfits I dislike, not jumping joyfully at gifts I detest, not holding back my ire or confusion or elation when the feeling is prompted. My wife was generally unfond of this trait, it seems, though she enjoyed the story about giving me bowling shoes for a birthday and me getting to the midpoint of unwrapping between paper and box, seeing that it was a shoebox, and crying out “You got me shoes?” before realizing their specific ilk. It always sounded endearing when she told it, but maybe she was just trying to show how hard it was to live with me.
Tears are also hard to hold back, and probably nothing I’d try to even if I could. Unlike honesty, they’re an innate biological reaction. They well up and spill, enlisting one’s chest and eyes and larynx in the cause, throwing the whole world into pathos. Stinging, overwhelming, blinding. It is hard to see the point in anything when crying, both literally and figuratively. Crying blots out the sun, opens up the soul.
It’s opening up boxes that brought on the crying this afternoon, unsurprisingly. You see where this is all going. Just weeks ago now, even days, I packed myself little timebombs and improvised lachrymosizing devices. Tamped them down and sealed them over and put them in a neat light brown stack that looked nothing like the danger lurking within. They fit so easily into a U-Haul, into the living room, could’ve even gotten through Security if necessary. Waiting, patiently, as only the inanimate produce of human accumulation can. Ready to look and feel just like the day they went in the box, like all the days before.
There’s a reason I’m not fully unpacked yet, perhaps not really even close. I’d managed to forget the reason for a while, forget how hard it is to keep knifing into tape and unfolding flaps when angry jacks pop from every box. My friend Pete Lee made a movie about this, a movie about love unfulfilled and the power of a box to store emotions. You should watch it.
We all should watch it, in the colloquial use of that phrase. Every time we sit down to folding, shaping, constructing another corrugated cubic vault. What traps are we laying with the trappings of the packing industry? At what cost have 3M and U-Haul made their billions?
There are still fifteen or twenty packages sitting in the living room. Some folded and defeated, broken to their innocent component parts in a stack by the fireplace, waiting for the thresh of the recycling process or the chance perhaps to cloak more daggers. I lack the energy to engage again tonight. Sit they will, the broken and the heavy, knowing nothing of the water they are bound to loose in the future. Surer than a rain-dance, an overweight cloud, the path of least resistance. Each item seen, lifted, placed, restored, all with the asterisk of the droplet it evoked.
There’s no crying in baseball. Maybe I should see how the Giants are doing.
