The Shoebox

Kids, everyone has a shoebox. It is the shoebox that contains the memories -- pictures, notes, trinkets -- of past relationships. As much as you try to hide it from yourself, every so often you stumble onto it again and have to ask yourself the same question yet again, "what do I do with this stuff?" Well, today while I was cleaning a room, I found the shoebox.

I can hear you asking now, "why do people keep a shoebox in the first place?" I could chalk it up to human nature, but that's not much of an answer. Some people may keep the shoebox in hopes that someday the relationship will come back together, as a way of holding on to what once was. Others may keep them as memories of a positive time in their life they might want to remember. Still others may just be packrats or not really know what else to do with it. As for myself, I don't really know why I keep it, but I also just don't know what else to do with it.

Sure, the easy solution is just to throw it all away, never to be heard of again. But somehow I can't bring myself to do it. Don't get me wrong, I'm well over the past, but similarly I don't harbor any ill feelings towards it either. It almost seems wrong to throw it all away and pretend like it didn't happen, because it was such an important part of my life and has shaped who I am today, for better or worse.

What I've heard is a common approach to the old pictures is simply to cut out the "other half" of the memories. Does that really solve much? For me it's not the picture itself, but the memory that the picture triggers. You can't cut a memory apart, it's all or none. Yet still, I also am in no way interested in looking through the shoebox either. My first reaction when finding it was "oh, that's what's in there..." and promptly I closed the box back up. I don't think I'd have any problem doing so, but it's almost as if I don't have any desire to remember it all.

So what do I do with the shoebox? Nothing. I put it back on the shelf until the next time I stumble into it. At some point, I'll probably go through it and throw most of it away. But not today.