Librodidact

613 words | 4 min read

Today’s writing is an essay about embodied memory. So many objects in our life represent what has been, what could be, or even what we wish had happened instead.

I stand before the donation box, holding a pair of my son’s blue jeans. He wore them every day, and love pours from the soft denim. The donation box waits, a grubby coffin. Beside it, a garbage bag spills the remains of someone’s life at my feet. I pull open the door to the box and lean inside.

It’s menacing, fetid, and dark. I back away and press the jeans to my chest, reconsidering. I can’t do this, but I must. A minivan waits behind me, and no minivan should ever be kept waiting. Hurry it up, lady, the angry, imagined words float in the air. Can you believe this?

I never understood hoarding until I had children. Maybe it comes from being a poor kid with almost nothing to my name. Emptiness doesn’t trouble me–emptiness feels like home. Why can’t hoarders just let go, I’d think. It feels good to be free.

And now, twice a year, I march into a battle I’m guaranteed to lose: Operation Outgrown. I sort battalions of old soldiers pulled from my children’s closets, hunting down the too-small and too-worn. The stacks lean on each other for moral support, knowing they’re soon to be parted. We’ve had a good run. See you on the other side, brother.

At some point my husband ventures into the hallway. He doesn’t step into the room, only leans around the doorframe, shielded from the carnage.

“You okay?”

Surrounded by an army of clothing, I’m bent over and wheezing. A small white shirt becomes a flag under his nose.

“Look,” I wail with pathetic anguish, and he does. “They were so little.” 
It’s the same refrain every time, but to his credit, he never laughs.

I stand before the donation box, and the late afternoon sun casts a golden haze across the jeans. It’s not the end of the road, I tell myself. Some other little boy will love these, demand they be washed every day and complain when they aren’t. He’ll fill the pockets with rocks, seashells, found coins. Irresistably tiny golf pencils, and the occasional bloody tooth that onced occupied a crooked smile.

The fabric is soft under my thumbs, and I’m a crazy woman sobbing over a pair of pants in the middle of a parking lot beside a donation bin, while the mortified family in the minivan wonders if maybe they should go somewhere else. 

Deep breath like a diver, and into the chute they go, along with the other remains of a childhood past. I think about the jeans all the way home. About the little legs that used to fill them, bigger now, more muscular. At the stop light, I consider going back. 

You can take a U-turn here, a wild whisper comes from the space between my ribs. They’re probably still on top of the pile—there’s still time to save them! I agree, imagining the minivan full of people watching in horror as I climb inside the bin.

The light turns green, and the auto-pilot of my brain saves me, carries me home. I sit in the car in the driveway, the silence pressing into my ears. I could still go back. In memory, the denim is warm as a kiss on my cheek. Something that’s gone and will never return. Rounded baby limbs now man-shaped and strong.

I stand at the door to another box; my home, listening to the shouts and joyous screams beyond, and it is anything but a coffin. Love waits inside.

☼