A Hundred Cardboard Boxes
On the difference between one cardboard box and a hundred
There are about a hundred cardboard boxes in the house right now.
Some of them are stacked against the wall in the office. Some of them are still where the movers left them, in the corner of a room that hasn't decided what it is yet.
A few are open. Most are taped shut with labels in my wife’s handwriting or mine. The words that made sense when we packed don’t quite make sense now.
The boxes are everywhere. Walking through the house means walking around boxes. When you’re looking for something, knowing which box it’s in, or not, is equally as likely.
There was another cardboard box a long time ago. Someone handed it to me the day I got laid off. Everything from my desk was in it.
It was the first corporate job I’d ever had, and I thought I’d figured out how the world worked. I’ve written about that box before. What I said then was that the day I got handed it set in motion everything about who I became after.
I remember the texture of the box. I remember standing in the parking lot holding it and not knowing what to do next. A single, small box. I could carry it with one hand if I had to.
Now there are a hundred boxes in the house and I’m nowhere near the parking lot.
The hundred boxes aren’t asking me what to do next. They’re asking me what to keep.
Some of the boxes are easy. Books go on shelves. Kitchen things go in cabinets. Clothes go in closets. The decisions inside those boxes have already been made; unpacking them is just putting them where they go.
Other boxes are harder.
I open one and find something I haven’t seen in years. A card from someone I don’t talk to anymore. A photograph from a job I don’t remember taking. A folder of documents from a house we lived in for four years and haven’t lived in for fifteen.
I hold each thing for a second before I decide. Sometimes I don’t decide. I put it back in the box and tell myself I’ll come back to it, knowing I probably won’t.
There’s no parking lot anymore. There’s no urgency about what happens next. What there is instead is a hundred small decisions about what version of my life gets to come into this house with me.
This is the last house we’ll ever own.
The payment on it has to work three or four years from now, when I actually retire. The pool has to still be a pool when we’re too old to swim in it. Every decision about this house has been made with a version of us in mind that isn’t here yet.
The hundred boxes aren’t just asking me what to keep. They’re asking who I’m keeping it for. It’s the version of me who has to live in this house when none of these decisions can be undone.
You probably have your own version of this. Different house, different boxes, different name for it.