The Third Time You Look

April fourteenth. Easter weekend. The box has been on the kitchen shelf since December, and I have opened it twice, once in January, once in early March, and both times I named one thing and closed the lid before I could think about it too carefully. I didn't plan to open it today. There was no particular reason, no anniversary, nothing pressing. The apartment was quiet in the specific way it gets on a holiday weekend when you're not going anywhere, and at some point I was just standing there in front of the shelf, and then the box was open in my hands, and then I was sitting down on the kitchen floor with it.

The first object I named months ago: small, held in one hand, a material I hadn't expected. The second I named in March: lighter than the first, a different texture, the kind of thing you'd describe to someone by the way it feels before you said what it was. Today I looked at both of them together for the first time and then looked at what was still below them. I don't know how many things are in the box. I never counted. I've been approaching it the way you approach something you're not sure you're ready for, one look at a time, lid back on, time to sit with it before the next.

two things named. the box still open.

What I noticed today, sitting there on the kitchen floor, was that the question had shifted. It's not 'what's in the box' anymore, exactly. It's something closer to: what's going to be left when I've named everything, and what will I do with that. There's a version of this where the box ends up empty and I've held every object that was my mother's and I know what each one is, and that's just a fact I'll have and live with. I set the lid back on and put the box on the counter and stood for a while at the windowsill looking at the arrangement, the letterpress card, the two photographs, Carol's small object, the cord slightly to one side. The collapsed bowl on the shelf above the stove, Gerald's vine grazing below it. The whole kitchen, doing its quiet thing.

the arrangement, and the question behind it.

I didn't place anything new today. I didn't decide anything. But I think the box has fewer things in it than I imagined, and that might be what I actually found out.