Unpacking Beginnings and Endings

By Isabelle B.L

The box, 35x55x36, sat on the table like an offering on an altar.

Sally and Jayne, the betrayers, and me, the betrayed, stood before the box. While they locked fingers, I placed my hands in my pockets in an attempt to prevent chaos. When they peered inside the box, a short film played in my mind. An imaginary director shouted: action!

We three gather here today to celebrate the beginning of one union and to mourn the death of another.

This short film functioned as a means to control the unbearable. Previous methods included sarcasm and launching objects across the room. I couldn’t decide on a role for myself: the marriage celebrant, a forgiving bridesmaid, the betrayed hiding in a corner of the left transept.

When Sally slid an engagement ring on my finger, it felt like a prelude to the one. But rings can be removed. Our common love for travel and adventure created consequences. We needed a roommate to help pay the rent. Jayne ended up more than just a roommate. She became the one—for Sally. Who says you only fall in love once?

Moves meant packing and unpacking boxes regularly. Boxes became heavier, loaded with objects and memories. Sally and I had collected first editions from dusty shelves lining the walls of secondhand bookstores. Bought a bike to ride together in narrow Parisian rues just like Henry Miller and his wife, June. Made enthusiastic purchases from village markets. Filled our boxes with bamboo tubes that played music orchestrated by gentle winds. Marveled at the magical beads—a gift from a spiritual man in a long robe who predicted our longevity but never gave us an expiration date.

Finally, a good box.

Together, the betrayed and the betrayers peered inside the cardboard container. Long pearl necklaces, rings, bracelets, and headbands formed a mountain in the middle. Detached from necks, fingers, wrists, and heads. I wondered if Sally and Jayne noticed the silent, black-and-white movie playing amid the bonfire of pearls, crystals, and gold. Josephine Baker and Colette danced around their sparkling possessions while Mata Hari, hands tied with a thick rope, was dragged away by French guards to her execution.

Sally and Jayne’s voices receded into a foreshortened painting. Invoices, Invitations, Ikea loomed in the distance while box and betrayal and blur hammered like persistent tinnitus in my ear.

When I wasn’t hiding in a box, the box became a house for my dolls. I drew rectangles for windows and a bigger one for a door. With my unicorn ruler, I created straight lines for grass. My teacher at school showed me how to draw bricks. Many horizontal lines with vertical lines that didn’t align with one another. I recreated families from TV. Mothers with permanent radiant faces. Happy fathers full of cuddles who arrived just in time for a bedtime story. Children who always solved their problems in ten minutes or less. TV kids didn’t need to hide in boxes.

As the* fee-fi-fo-fum* sounds expanded, I climbed into my box and closed the flaps. Long coats turned day into night until wardrobe doors flung open, wooden and wire coat hangers collided, flaps torn to reveal me—a giant armadillo curled into a ball—one last attempt at disguise. But the box failed to provide protection.

A bad box.

Although I’d prefer not to share my space with a radioactive substance, I envied Schrödinger’s cat, shut in a box, creating mystery. Maybe they wondered if I was dead or alive, before they decided to leave me alone.

It would have been fun to be a box on a conveyor belt. On a moving mat to an unknown destination. Boxes became anything I wanted them to be: houses, hospitals, or huts in a remote village away from predators where only tiny, furry neighbors rustled in the leaves, and sounds of nature lullabied everyone to sleep. Boxes that were banned from Jaynes. Emptied and refilled by Sallys and the first woman to whom they proposed. A box that carried intrigue and mystery, revolution and resistance from Matas and Josephines, not women who wrote about Gigi and Gaston.

Sharp instruments punctured boxes. Holes didn’t mean the end of a box. Scotch tape covered hollow spaces, and empty boxes became full again, carried away to other rooms and possessed by their sole owners. From the outside, the box appeared fine. Under close inspection, scars showed, but the box remained functional, carrying first editions and books on quantum physics.

Wounded box.

And now you may kiss the bride.

I became marriage celebrant, bridesmaid with a bottle of confetti ready to pop, and the betrayed, but not hiding in the corner of the right transept. Three in one. The father, son, and the holy ghost, Amen.

When Sally and Jayne left for their honeymoon, I gathered the altar in the film. I gathered the box in reality. The box and I grieved an unfulfilled future. But alternative futures existed. The next box would be good. It wouldn’t unleash internal monologues, historical love affairs, and revolutionary heroes. Spiritual gurus could keep their prophecies to themselves. I’d fill the new box with trinkets from solitary travels.

Fully recovered box.