Whose Eyes?

This evening, I was finalizing my chair application for BruinMUN next year when I decided to skim through my MUN Monday posts again to see if I'd forgotten anything.

I've forgotten a lot.

Man, why can't things be the way they used to be? Hotel rooms and airplane rides with a massive group people we called family. Now, I sit here, wracked with uncertainty and disappointment about what the future holds. I didn't understand reality then, and I'm sure that, when I look back on this in a few years, I'll wish I could afford to be so uncertain about little things like summer plans and internship applications. The world just keeps getting bigger, and I'm scared that it's all just going to pop one day and collapse like a punctured hot air balloon.

At that moment, then, I'll wonder what it is that I've actually done with my life. Stuff that wouldn't fit on a resume, stuff that doesn't go in the "Would you like to add anything else?" box at the end of online applications. Stuff that means something.

It's vague, uncertain, sure. In anyone's eyes but mine, these things mean nothing. But I am I and I am.

So I have this box. It's a sort of white-ish, green-ish color. Small-ish. Shiny. Ish. It was a gift from the mother of perhaps my oldest friend. It's got a lock on it, which made up for the swirly little butterflies engraved across the surface. I started putting stuff in there when I started middle school. Deflated balloons from a birthday. old movie tickets. A shotgun shell. Gradually, stuff began to pile up in the little box. A foam chili pepper. A tiny FM radio. A dried out strip of leather. A letter stained blue from riding around in the back pocket of my jeans. It was a mess, really. It is a mess. It's a terribly cluttered analogy for everything I've done, gaudy on the outside, but locked tight, jumbled on the inside.

This box is shoved deep into the bowels of my old desk at home, the one with the metal drawers that screech and groan. I still carry the key with me even though I once picked the lock with a bobby pin. Keys mean something, just as boxes do. Something. Some stuff.

Some time.