Bestfriends with Empty Spaces
My mother has decided that our house is a garden of useless things. My brother hitches broken keyboards and grade school papers out of a window and a hill of outgrown clothes takes its place. It happens every time we clean up. As if these corners refuse to be anything but overflowing, with old newspapers, scratched up DVDs, and even people. We are a family of eight, it has gotten used to our weight, anything less is unhealthy. There are garbage bags outside every door, like sentinels against another nostalgia invasion. In many Filipino households, it is our motto to say “pwede pa yan,” roughly translated to “that’s still okay” or “we can still use that,” applicable to material things and even people. Anything less is wasteful. There is no such thing as throwing away. In my family, it was instinctual to hold everything close to our hearts, not to cherish, just not to forget. Letting go is a language we never learned. It was always “hold on.” Hold on, even when it didn’t make any sense.
We expressed this behavior in multiple ways. My father kept receipts of our sins, ready to jab them in our faces whenever we had to pay him respect. My mother kept everything to herself: grievances, smiles, tears. . . when they fell, she caught them before they could make another mess on the floor. No one knew how to clean that up. My oldest brother kept figurines. My second eldest brother collected shoes. My third brother liked jokes, he had them tattooed on his brain for every social event. My eldest sister hoarded notebooks; in grade school, she bought one for every day of the week. My youngest sister loved the color yellow: duck puppets, yellow headbands, and SpongeBob pillow covers. And I collected boxes.
For as long as I could remember, I’ve collected boxes. Not with the intent of storing anything, only to have the opportunity to do so. My favorite color was pink. I had pink shoe boxes and pink jewelry boxes. I had woven boxes. I had plastic boxes. I took my brothers' shoe boxes because their feet were bigger than mine. Every time I found a new box, I would store them in my closet. Sometimes, my clothes would lose room for those empty spaces. This went on until I realized that filling them up meant that birthdays and Christmases could be an every second, every day kind of thing. I liked how I could pretend that every box was a present I’ve yet to open. A gift, a memorial to all my adventures: stones I pilfered from construction sites, shells my cousins brought me from oceans I’ve never seen,a bottle of sand art that’s been shaken enough times to lose its rainbow, it looked like sugar now. Being young meant not knowing that until I’ve tested it for myself. Word of advice: Don’t eat sand. Let your hands savor them instead, the most natural thing in the world is to watch gravity pull them from your fingers.
They housed a mash of memories in no complete order. A snowman made of cotton balls, I must have made so that I could somehow experience winter. Living in a tropical country meant that heat was never a gentle companion. A golden glitter heart pendant that must have come from a best friend whose name eludes me. If you’re reading this, I’m sorry. Still, my hands knew our friendship was special enough to be kept in this small way. A pink bracelet, my cousin found on a mall floor. I remember her telling me that she washed them. I suppose, back then, trust was the only easy thing to give to someone else. A charm necklace I bought from a street vendor during my fourth-grade field trip. Rust freckles the surface I’ve rubbed whenever I was nervous. A prayer book from our neighborhood church, I no longer go to church so it would be hard to track when I decided this was important.
I took these tiny stories wherever I went. They say that you’re never fully dressed without a smile, I was never entirely whole if I wasn’t attached to a box, a doorway to a world that never changes, a theater that existed just for me. Just me and my fragments of personality against the universe. It was proof that I was here. I couldn’t see myself around my five siblings, I was constantly enveloped in their loudness and their tallness. Some mirrors tended to graze just the top of my head. I don’t have a lot of baby pictures where I smiled. But to the four corners that I held, I was the sun that kept it alive. It was loneliness only an empty box could understand. One that was brought to life once, only to become invisible when others realize that it’s got nothing else to give. Perhaps, we hold on because we’re afraid of who we are when we forget. Perhaps, it’s difficult to let go because our muscles are used to the strain of holding on. Anything less is defeat. It is surrendering to a life that will not always remember that you exist.
I am 20 and I’ve stopped collecting boxes. My eldest brother has given away his figurines. My second brother still loves shoes. My third brother continues to make jokes, they’ve gotten more inappropriate as he aged. My older sister no longer hoards notebooks, she steals pictures of her newborn daughter instead. My little sister has learned to love other yellow things, like mangoesand bananas. My father is the same. But my mother has learned to hold her hand out, her heart was in her sleeve this whole time. I keep my memories in words now. They are easier to store than boxes, they’re not just empty spaces. I still don’t like pictures. I don’t like how I look at any angle. So, I write to remember. I write to make sense of all the clutter. I’ve blotted, crossed out, and erased so many paragraphs. I have a garden of wilted and blooming possibilities. And yet I am not less. It is okay to not carry my baggageall the time. I am more than all the things I have forgotten or wish I could forget. When my motherasks what I can give away, I let that lonely child go. I’ve kept her attached to me for too long, weighing the rest of me to a past I cannot change. I won’t forget her. She doesn’t deserve that. I’ve learned that even if the rest of the world forgets that I exist. I’ll look at these memories. I’ll look at the scars that have kept me holding on. And I know that I exist. I see me. I am here, a little dusty, a little scratched, a little heavy but still home. That is more than okay, that is more than enough.