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Boxes
Chapter One
Between Lieutenant and Lifebelt
The Oxford School Dictionary’s definition of life is:
1. The ability to function and grow
2. The period between birth and death
3. Living things. “Is there life on Mars?”
4. Liveliness, full of life
5. A biography
When I went to look up life in the dictionary, you can imagine I was a bit disappointed in what I found. Granted it was an Oxford SCHOOL Dictionary (a couple or ten years out of date), but really this is no excuse.
I don’t know what I was looking for when I searched through the boxes I have yet to unpack, left from home. I still call it home, although May insists my home is with her, it’s not. My home’s in England. I think I was hoping for some guidance. That didn’t happen. I’ve been looking in books a lot for guidance. The Bible didn’t particularly help. I came out of that experience feeling thoroughly depressed and guilty. Religion has a knack of doing that to you. Plus the Bible is full of death. Have you noticed that? Death and sex, really it would be quite a good story, if it weren’t for said religion.
Anyway, back to what I was saying. I was sitting in the attic, where a lot of the stuff I brought from England’s been hidden away. Through no ones insistence but my own. Looking back on it I think it was an attempt to keep it to myself you know? It was my life, and I didn’t want anyone to intrude upon it. Yet again I seem to be going of on a tangent, but bear with me there’s a point to this one.
I kept all the boxes my Dad sent to me, economy class, in the attic. And one day I was leafing through some homework, pretending to understand when I just got bored. I got bored of trying to decipher what was being said, by people who are now all dead, so I looked for a dictionary. I don’t know why May doesn’t own a dictionary, although I wasn’t surprised I didn’t find one amongst her abundant collection of self-help books. Although I did find an ‘Easy guide to a new you in just a few simple steps’. I think I might have to read that one one day. I don’t particularly like the old me. But then again, if I end up like Aunt May, then maybe I’ll just stick with who I am. So not finding what I was looking for I thought maybe I might have one in the attic with my other stuff.
The stairs that lead up to the attic are odd. Not scary and derelict like so many of my friend’s entrances to the great storage rooms of dust and decay. Like the rest of my Aunt’s house they are kept in pristine condition, just in case anyone was to happen upon them. Heaven forbid we give the wrong appearance to the neighbors. “What would they THINK Petra?” (She never can call me Tree like everyone else, I think she’s scared I might start walking around bare foot singing and playing the guitar, talking about love of mother earth. She’s an odd one my Aunt.) They are perfectly carpeted in the same beige as the rest of the house’s floors. The walls are that same hospital white my Aunt is so fond of, and there are even a few picture’s hanging on the walls. Family photos, where everyone is smiling. Needless to say I am not in any of them.
The attic however is as all attics should be. Neglected and in blessed disarray. I love it up there; it reminds me of how the box room in my house used to be. Piles of unlabeled boxes full of memories and stories. It’s the only place in the house that doesn’t remind me of a hospital. During my first few months, I used to spend my time up there, in the quiet just thinking. Aunt May called it moody and morbid. At the time I shrugged it off and granted her a few extra points for alliteration. Now I still think she was wrong but I can understand where she was coming from.
Anyway I was rooting through the box marked ‘Tree’s stuff. Don’t open under pain of death’ (magic markers really are brilliant when you’re an angry teen who’s being uprooted). And I found it. My dictionary. Dog eared with my name scrawled in the front, and pages and posits sticking out from where I had found cool words. It made me smile and as I went back down to my room in the basement I hugged to my chest trying to find some resemblance of my old home in it. As if it had absorbed the essence of my house by the sea from all the years it spent on my bookshelves. And maybe even hoping that it had also absorbed a little bit of mum. Silly isn’t it. Anyway, I went back to my work, now armed with a dictionary. And the boxes were forgotten, or at least pushed into the background for a little bit.