Boxes

I spent the weekend on the floor of my apartment with eleven shoeboxes, which turns out to be what ten years of letters fill.

I'd never counted them. I keep every letter I get, and answer every one, and for years they've gone into boxes on the closet shelf, a box a year, with the year written on the lid. I didn't know that was my mother's habit until I wrote about my father in September. This weekend I took them all down, because they needed packing, and you can't pack a letter without reading at least the first line.

So: my mother's, by far the most, nearly every week since 2014, on the blue paper she buys in packs of two hundred. Ruth Ann's, one every December since 2017, a cardinal on the front and the weather in Columbus and in Lancashire inside, the second secondhand. Kristin's, mostly cards, mostly late, all funny. Birthday cards from Priya, who draws on the envelopes. Two letters from Owen, written the same week he was sick, both entirely about a server. And a box of their own for the letters from strangers, people who wrote to me about a quest, because those always feel a little as if they belong to someone else and I'm only keeping them.

What surprised me was how much of my own life is in there, seen from outside. I don't keep copies of what I send. But you can read the letters someone wrote back and see the shape of what you must have said. "I'm sorry the move was hard." "You sound tired." "I knew they'd see it, congratulations." My half of ten years is in those boxes in negative, like a footprint in snow.

I packed them carefully, with tissue paper, which is excessive, and labeled them, and stacked them by the door, where they make a small wall I walk around to get to the kitchen.

What do you keep, when you can't keep everything?