The Empty Box, Eventually

May seventeenth.

The box has been on the kitchen shelf since December 2021, which means it has been there for a year and a half, which means I have walked past it approximately five hundred times without opening it. I opened it in January 2022. I opened it again in February. I opened it a third time in April, a few weeks ago, and found it nearly empty, one object still inside, sitting in the bottom of the box the way things do when everything else has already been decided around them.

I opened it again today.

I don't know what I was waiting for. Wednesday afternoon in May, the light coming through the kitchen window at that particular late-afternoon angle it gets this time of year, Gerald doing whatever Gerald does with his vine, I wasn't waiting for any of that. I wasn't waiting for anything. That's the thing about the lag, the one I've written about before: sometimes it ends not because you decided to end it, but because you run out of reasons to let it keep going. The box was almost empty. One object left. I picked it up.

six objects plus one beside. the gap holds.

I didn't place it today. I'm not writing this to say that I did. What I want to say is something smaller than that, which is that the box being almost empty feels like its own information, separate from whatever I decide to do with what's left inside. Carol sent that box in December 2021 because she didn't know what else to do with it, and I received it because I didn't know what else to do with her not knowing, and somewhere in all that not-knowing the box sat on a shelf and became a fact about the apartment the way the collapsed bowl is a fact, the way the cord on the windowsill is a fact. The things that stay long enough stop being questions.

The windowsill arrangement is still there. Letterpress card, two photographs, Carol's small object, the gap where the collapsed bowl used to be before I moved it to the shelf. The macramé cord slightly off to one side, not quite part of the group, not quite separate either. I look at it every morning when I'm making coffee and I don't think about any of it consciously, which is, I think, the definition of having put something down. The box isn't empty yet. But I can see the bottom of it now, and the bottom is just cardboard, and I'm not afraid of it.