Boxes in the Attic

 Dear Internauts,

How does it feel?

It feels slippery, coated with a layer of familiarity that frustrates any attempts at grasping, holding onto, or analyzing what’s underneath. It tastes salty and like the sick that climbs up the back of my throat when I haven’t eaten for a while. Apple slices you can get pre-packaged at some gas stations always have this acidity that dries up my tongue and makes me worry about if its poisonous. The way it smells flits around moment by moment between artificial sweetener, cow patties on the rain, antiseptic clinic hallways, or kicking up bits of road tar and oil spills into the sterile chill of deep winter. Heavy as fuck and rough too, though more scratchy than anything, and I’m carrying that carpet or over-stuffed box of Christmas wreaths up the pull-down ladder stairs to a crawl space. A thin layer of insulation spreads between the 2x4 support beams, one misstep and that’s eight to ten feet to the hard floor. I’m especially careful when I think I’m over the stairs, not so much because of the farther fall at the bottom but because of how it would feel to land on the stairs themselves. The way the wood fits into my kneecap as I kneel brings to mind how the edge of a step might feel to the back of my head. Staying focused on pushing the boxes into some organized pattern keeps my mind off how parts of me would fit on those stairs if I fell through. Attic dust is distinct, with unique flavors for every space but an earthy after-taste common anywhere.

Straddling the ladder, I reach down to help pull up the next box or bin or suitcase. Doesn’t much matter the season, that attic—that miniature universe, that vacuum bag—is always sweltering. My skin melts into thick pockets around my wrists, elbows, armpits, knees, waist, any joints really. The grime of the job with the sweat on my hands swirls into a mud-swamp, forcing me to overtax my fingers on grasping the next delivery. There is no comfortable position, with my lower back taking the worst. I’m told since I’m young I’ll bounce back. I’m flexible, or at least more so than whoever feels like telling me. The voices can fade together in general, like a mosaic where every tiny square is a needle under my fingernails.

Even when there is a lull in the pushing and the lifting, my job isn’t finished. I kneel and spin and plan my steps. Sliding and stacking the baggage does get easier over time, but I never feel any better at it. At a certain point the whole task smudges up together, my every swampy joint aching and my eyes blinking in excess from their constant need to flood out invaders. Soon enough a new train will pull up to the bottom of the ladder, where the delivery system reinvents itself poorly at least three times before settling on a three-fourths approach. They lift the box up one fourth of the way, and I hang by ankles, twisting every ligament. I speculate that often there is a worry I will be able to hold the box and it will come crashing down upon its giver. To compound the box’s weight is its giver’s reluctance to fully let go, a silent plea ascending and bouncing around the rafters that I pull it from their grasp. This of course would mean I gain not only responsibility to store away the box and its contents but also the synthetic burden of having taken it from them by force. Even due to my precarious position as compared to their free use of the hallway space to leap out of the way, I have still never allowed a box to topple back down and crush anyone. However, if I should drop a box, the fault may lie in the immediate use of the aforementioned leaping space by the giver the moment their box has changed hands. In summation, the box is mine now, I pulled it from them, and they moved far enough away to regard it as something distant, alien even.

Betrayal comes to my mind, as it might come to yours. Or perhaps you wonder at my foolishness to continue finding myself up in that attic, arranging boxes. After all, if everybody has a box to bear, shouldn’t the burden of the box be on the bearer? I don’t think any one of us could say we’ve never labored under the weight of a box too heavy for to what distance we mean go. Contrariwise, our culture of box-bearing encourages a commercial trade of burdens so regular, we schedule our every hour by it. I would never try and convince you I’m the only one to take on others’ burdens.

What I mean to explain, however, is that this betrayal is common in my life. Specifically, I continue to find myself hanging by my ankles, receiving weighty admissions from those who smell most like a freshly laundered blanket on your own favorite chair at home. The greatest disguise to disarm and distract is no disguise at all. In this spirit—the spirit of honesty—home comes to me and pushes up some honesty. In the box there is always a tender nerve, a speck of vulnerability enough to convince me to reach out again and again. And they push a little, and I pull that box up and find somewhere to squeeze it into my dusty, crowded crawlspace.

“I used to hate you,” sits in the corner where the wood is cracked enough to cast new light on a box and its contents. Years of unknown bitterness and unexpressed vitriol, at least to my face, are now laid plain before me. Sometimes, after they’ve let their fingers loose of the box, they will start to turn away but then face me once more. A bit of the light from the attic wall causes them to squint up at me and offer me forgiveness for whatever I did leading to their anger and loathing. Despite the glare, I can never seem to find a clear piece of anything in the box describing what I’d actually done to hurt them and then be undeserving of their gift of forgiveness. A few smaller but much heavier boxes are stacked behind those in the far right corner, containing “And I still do.”

Some boxes are made of a similar material and delivered with that same genuine smile and concerned tone, handed up slow to make sure I can get a real strong grasp of it. These come in different shapes and sizes, but always appear much heavier at first than they end up being, causing me at times to overcompensate and fly backwards. My elbows or even my funny bone will suffer in its attempt to save me from falling through the floor. Take, for example, this big blue boxes with stars drawn all over it. Carried to me in slow, careful steps, the sight of it made me tense up, ready for anything. “I used to have all these feelings for you...” read those boxes’ labels. I take my grip and get ready to pull up the massive weight of whatever kind of feelings those were. The bearer lets go, and I fly backward, narrowly avoiding insulation death. Flying out of my hands, the deceptive container bursts open mid-air, raining down a confetti shower of “...but now I don’t even think about you,” and “...but now I’ve moved on and am so over you” and, my personal favorite, “...but I’ve matured beyond that and don’t need you anymore.” Cleaning up this confusing mess can be quite a task, especially when I find amongst the tinker-tape explosion, a few, small balloons in the shape of the common and inferred, “...so you should be proud of me.”

(An important exception to the norm should be noted, in that while organizing all these other boxes of phrases and emotions and decisions and values, I have at times heard a knock behind me. Turning to the ladder, I see someone has pushed a box all the way up into the crawlspace without me having to lift it. At first, I suppose this seems sensible and fair. Tough love boxes, I used to call them. Problem is, when I open them up, a creature of some kind will often jump out and bite me or scratch at me, leaving deep marks before it scampers away to hide in the way back by the childhood traumas. Besides that these boxes are empty and without any real clue as to from whence they came. I call down the ladder, asking for whoever left the box, but there is never a response. I’m left to nurse my wounds and stack all the boxes alone, as per usual.)

Sometimes the box is very much meant for me, and other times there’s little thought to anything more than the bearer getting as far away from their box as possible. I just happen to be the one available to take it off their hands. Please know I don’t think my job an entirely negative experience. I’ve gotten good at finding a place for every shape and size of box and continue to improve at knowing what will fit best where. I even can enjoy the small segment of time hanging over that ladder, a box in both our hands. There’s an innate trust there that can just as easily be a growth experience as it can be mutually assured destruction.

The best is when I can simply do my part as another worker on the assembly line, a cog in the clockwork, a part of this complete breakfast. The problem, as you may have already surmised, is when something gums up the gears. A box is that pound too heavy, that inch too big, that slight shift off-balance. I know at any moment, what I hold in my arms or the heights I stack could come crashing down and me with them. There’s no way for me to handle this job without knowing that, and in fact, I can only now begin to understand what all these boxes are for and what I’m doing in this sweaty, dusty, cramped bit of storage space. Only after I crashed through that insulation, landed hard on those stairs, and bounce down to the damp, old basement, did I finally start to gain some perspective on the issue.

You see I’ve recently been unable to pack away one particular box. There are several places I know it could fit, but my hands are clamped tight around it. Heaviest box I’ve ever held, but far smaller than most. I often stare at where I know it will go, should go, but I can’t yet make myself crawl the few feet to that spot. There’s no lid or latch for this box, just a penny-sized hole in the top. Inside, it reads, “I don’t love you anymore.”

Often enough, my whole world is an attic full of boxes, and/but/so there have been plenty of times when I too have stood in line to lift my boxes up to some other creaky soul. But if you recall, there is a place in the wall of my attic where the wood is cracked and a beam of light slips its way into my world. It can be good to offer some perspective on this or that as I crawl around, but what if I tilt my head sideways and peek out? What lies outside this world of boxes and attics and ladders and hallways and stairs and even bigger boxes? What might I see if I looked out through that little break?

And what might look back at me?