On the car ride back from mother’s home in
Michigan one summer, we stopped
at an antique store, possibly my first.
My eyes wandered the piles and with magnetic fate
my hands drifted to a small cedar box, too dwarf to be a chest.

The lid held faded script, “civil war wax museum,”
and some kind of date that was invisible in the store’s light.

Maybe ten or twelve at the time, my wallet
was too non-existent to purchase the box, and
my mother stepped in, though later
in our years, she would place a ban on
my attraction to boxes, limiting their arrival in our home.

The first few years with the box layered the
bottom with two-dollar bills, an oddity my
great-grandmother sent in birthday cards.
The crisp bills are blessed with the company
of a chopped up card of unicorn tattoos.

The my middle school years added an envelope
to the collection, stuffed with pages
that I haven’t revisited in years, and don’t intend to,
though I know they are harmless notes.

My home-making era of sewing or embroidering
anything in sight left a folded wad of
soft yellow material, cushioning the innocence of
my young menagerie from the high school years.

There are three sections after the yellow cloth.

The first is a county fair map. Despite its current odor
of the wood box, I know that it once smelled of November,
and a boy that helped me begin to grow up. He was
three years older, but I was three years wiser.

My mother forbid our time halfway through
the few weeks we spent together, and I closed the door
on letting my mother ever seeing my heart again.

Next is less about the boy that filled the time it represents
and more about letting go. It all sits layered upon
a few locks of hair, tied with a piece of yarn
and curling perfectly, the way it never did while alive.
On top is a rock with a heart drawn on it in
adolescent boy hand, a break up note in purple crayon
that became more of a joke – due to its penmanship and
spelling – than a hard blow to my pride.

A black cord necklace with a silver and amber charm
is mixed in with the rock and hair. A gift
from a best friend I spent too many years trying to
live without over the distance of a thousand miles,
writing an endless number of composition books
full of thoughts that span the years, mailing them off
every other month so that somehow, we’d know
each other’s thoughts and everyday lives.

The final layer to date is two sheets of folded paper
from a steno pad I scribbled on during my final summer
of high school. The words resting on the lines
are in-the-moment of being in love, poetry that
may have had a chance at daylight if I had
been able to think of anything but how
perfect the world was. The words scrawled in a
slant are an after-thought, commanding
myself to remember, but to move on.

Folded into the middle crease is a small piece
of cardstock, a flat charm scotch-taped to it.
It matches the gift he gave me for my 17th birthday,
a leather journal, refillable so that I may never
have to part with the cover when the pages pass
from clean to full of last month’s main event.

Each time I have opened the box over the years,
I find a nearby slip of notebook paper – from today’s
homework or a poem I wrote in the middle of the night –
and stamp the date on it, slipping it into the items that
surround the months I was caught up in.

I coded my memories like a lazy secretary.
Instead of blue and red file tabs, I combined
them all under the neutral scent of cedar,
knowing that I could sift through everything
at the end of each year and try to make sense of
the events, but that I don’t need to, that I am
the only one pulling files from the
filing cabinet, the organization is all my own.

Though most things seems to be in chronological order,
everything is rearranged against my hindsight memory,
accompanied by their dates in case I
ever go back to look. But now they rest
in order of growing up, learning to

get over the way everything was always changing.

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