My family is made of hoarders.
They acquire pain
they do not know how to let go of.
Their boxes are my family's heirlooms,
passed down from attic to child.
I am eight, and the kids on the playground
point out all my thrift store clothing.
I put it in a box.
I am ten and forget
the words to my choir solo
and someone else's parent
suggests I find another hobby.
It goes in the box too.
My favorite cat gets hit by a car. Box.
The mean girls dump ketchup
on my head at recess. Box.
I start a poetry club
and no one shows up. Box.
My first heartbreak has its own box.
My first encounter with assault
takes up an entire shelf.
I cover it with a tarp
and call that healing.
Hope my parents
never do the spring cleaning
they always talk about
but never get around to
when it happens again.
There's no more room
on this shelf for boxes like that,
so I keep it under my bed.
I put all my leftovers in a box
labeled appetite when I'm 18.
It got stuck beneath all this disorder.
I pretend to not know where it went,
but finding it again feels like a relapse.
A kid tells me I have a fat face.
I chew up her words and spit them out
until there is nothing left in my mouth.
This box is still not satisfied.
I'm 21, and I've never met a box
I haven't tried to fit myself inside of.
And now, in the basement
of my parent's house,
I've lost track
of how many boxes are mine.
I open the one labeled "Mom"
and watch her care for her dying mother,
watch her spill out when we get the call.
My mother never cries.
When she does,
it gets shoved into her box,
watch her lose her posture after years
of carrying the weight of this family.
I cannot lift the lid of my father's box,
cannot keep him open side up,
stop him from unpacking
underneath our family tree.
Neither can my mother.
There are too many boxes here
for either one of them to hold,
so they stay covered in dust.
My father buys a storage unit
and leaves his sister's death inside.
She sits there with his father
who only told my father
that he loved him on his deathbed.
My father tries to tell me
that he loves me every day,
so I do not need a box with his name.
But we all carry each other's names
in this house full of cardboard.
My grandmother was buried
with boxes tight to her chest,
still sealed, never opened,
never unpacked,
never told us what happened to her,
though we always knew
something happened to her.
She died and sealed her story shut.
And I get it.
I would never want my family
to see what I keep in our basement.
I would never want to add
my story to their box.
My family is a basement full of boxes.
We do not look.
Nobody teaches me where they go
when I finally move out.
(cheers and applause)
