I opened another set of boxes today. One seems almost exclusively filled with small cement cats. As well there was an illuminated medieval letters colouring book from when I was four, a purple glass pyramid, and a dinosaur tooth. At the bottom, under the cats, I found a pocket size journal filled with someone else’s handwriting. None of these items are likely to be particularly odd on their own but taken as a whole, they’re making me laugh at myself. There were letters in another box, to myself from when I was in grade ten. “Are you even there to read this?” This is getting to be too interesting. I’m stalling trying to read all the papers I’m finding. At this rate I’m never going to get to inspecting the plastic champagne flute full of rare earth magnets and pieces of twisted silver solder or the instruction pamphlet for the pyramid, let alone drag another box into the room from under the livingroom table.
The second box I chose was entirely filled with fragiles secured in plastic bubble wrap. One bulky parcel unwrapped to reveal a clear glass christmas jar with a decorated tree enameled on. Inside it was half full of marbles and half full of ribbons with a few amethysts I’d carved with runes filled in with gold tossed in for safe keeping. It brought to mind Sunday, when Matthew had told me stories to keep me awake to combat my possible concussion. I looked at him through dangerously drowsy eyes and asked him to tell me about his childhood, tell me something I didn’t know. He replied by he recounting his most epic battle of marbles. It ended in a three way defeat, all contestants with bruised and broken fingers. He promised to teach me how to play. When he came over this evening, I had already hidden the jar aside behind a musical wind up clock and underneath a silk scarf patterned with the heavens that I found in the graveyard when I was fifteen. Other people had arrived and were arriving, filling up the livingroom in preparation for movies, but I took him into my room and closed the door. “Sit on the bed, darling, close your eyes and cup both of your hands in front of you. No, wait, we should put something in your lap to catch anything that falls.” He said I was making him nervous and I replied by telling him to leave enough room for me to sit with him as I draped a black skirt over his lap. “Close your eyes, no peeking.” I can’t imagine what the glass jar behind my back might have sounded like. Something clattering and hollow sharp. When the cold globules of glass began to rattle from the jar, pouring into his hands, I told him to open his eyes. It was a look of wonder. “These are oilies,” he exclaimed, and began joyfully rattling off the names of the different sorts that I had spilled into his hands to overflowing. Galaxies and speckles, cat’s eyes and champagne.
They were forgotten on my bedside table, wrapped in pale grey silk, but I know I made him happy.