When I little I wanted to change my name. As a matter of fact, I have come to realize that for the entire course of my life, I have wanted to be someone else. But that story is for another time.
This one is about my fascination with Pandora, the name and her box. I don’t know how I ever heard of her but I do remember being totally enamoured by her. Who was she? What’s in the box? Why do people care? Somewhere I found out about this box and the all the evil it held and it was then I wanted to change my name.
Since the dawning of my time, I have felt as though I was truly and without a doubt an evil person. Why? This I cannot say, for as I honestly have no idea why. Maybe it was due to the trouble caused by my birth. Maybe it was caused by the “broken home” syndrome. Maybe it’s because I am evil and I finally saw it. Either way Panora was to be my name…until it wasn’t.
I say all this to say, in one of my closets I have a box. To look at it, it seems odd and yet vexing. When I purchased the box, I thought of how it seems to force you to open it. And yet for several years now, open it is the last thing I want to do. You see originally this box which I padded and lined in satin was to be a “toy box”. I had read that no lesbian worth her soul would be without such a box to contain all the accoutrements of her sexuality. So I set out on a quest to find the perfect one. But as we all no, nothing is perfect and it was only later that I realized the evil this box was made for.
I studied all sorts of items that I deemed worthy of this box and collected them with a passion. But this box was not to be used…it held only the hope of maintaining an active physical relationship in a marriage I now see would not survive, much like my heart. Once we parted ways, I was adamant about its contents never being seen by anyone… not even me.
But that all changed.
One day I woke up….I realized that I was foolish for keeping all these expensive toys a secret. I might as well enjoy them. I tried, but I couldn’t. They were “our’s” and she was gone. So did the only thing I could do. I threw them all away. The box sat empty for quite some time and then I woke up…again.
She was everywhere. I could see her shaking her head in disgust in so many pictures. I could feel her heart turn cold to me in everything she gave me. So I placed all these things inside the box. I vowed to myself that I would never open it, except to destroy its contents one day. And so I did, I moved the box from room to room, but it haunted me. I would find myself just staring at it or touching it, because she was in it.
Calm down, not physically but metaphysically.
This box held pictures, jewelry, love letters, cards, random slips of paper, poems, and my soul. That was a few years ago and I still have the box. Every time I saw it I would tear up, no matter what my day had been like. See, there were(are) no words to describe how much I miss her and yet each day I see she is further and further away.
One day I was lamenting my lack of a daughter to which she replied, “Why don’t you adopt?” It was as if I had been hit in the face with an Army convoy. It was then I saw that I she didn’t miss me, she had blocked me out of her heart and her mind. It was then I knew I was blinded by my love for who I thought she was, not who she really is. All in one simple question, she had shown me that she was truly gone and I had never existed. It wasn’t just the question, but the perplexed look the accompanied it. She looked at me like she genuinely felt like I could adopt. Like she wasn’t there when we built a nursery for our daughter. Like she wasn’t there with me when the police put us out of the hospital where out baby was born. Like she simply wasn’t there at all.
Now why would she care how I felt by this question. She had all that I had wanted for us. She is in a happy, loving relationship. She is surrounded by babies everywhere and I…well we all know what I have, there’s no sense in stating the uber obvious.
But you know what further vexes me? I have been to “their” house and I have seen “their” things and I have seen something most peculiar. Sitting quietly in the shadows on the floor there lays a box. A box not unlike my own…one can only speculate at what evils it will one day hold.
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