Yellow Black Box

A square yellow box I made in twelfth grade ceramics class is an accidental time capsule. 

1.    Some quick examples: a duck’s curly tail feather (so cute), a peace sign necklace (so gaudy), a blue soda can tab (so what? Also, what kind of soda used to have a blue tab??). 

2.    A tiny prick of melancholy lingers in the pit of my stomach while I unearth a nickel with a hole drilled through it, my high school bus pass, pictures of Billy Corgan cut from SPIN magazine (post-Siamese Dream, after he shaved his head), and an airline boarding pass from Baltimore to Frankfurt. I reminisce for a minute and mourn a little for…I’m not sure what. The days when I wasn’t the one responsible for paying for plane tickets and decorating a school locker was an art form?

The black-and-white Xeroxed photo on the bus pass would be a good one except for the shadow on my face that makes me look like Fred Flintstone. Too bad, because this photo is actual proof that I had at least one good hair day in my life. I throw the pass away and wonder if the bus driver is still alive. I hope so. He was pretty old even back then. As for the nickel, I vividly remember being sixteen and drilling a hole with my grandfather’s drill press—without permission—in a tie-dyed die with yellow dots, but I have no memory of drilling a nickel. I must have gotten Nate McManus to do it for me in his sixth-period shop class. There’s a piece of broken cord threaded through the hole, and I remember wearing the nickel as a necklace (nickelace?) until I realized that the circular bruises I kept seeing near my throat weren’t bruises at all but discolorations caused by the nickel rubbing against my skin. Whoops.

3.    Faded beyond readability, a little pile of ticket stubs. These are the kind of things I would absolutely expect Past Me to save. After all these years, they’re just shadows of movies, concerts, or admission to tourist sites and theme parks. After looking through these faded bits of paper, I throw them away, too, and discarding the ghosts of long-ago fun feels sadder than getting rid of the bus pass. Though we did have some good times on that bus.

4.    Without a doubt, the most perplexing artifact is a souvenir keychain from Hawaii. It’s one of those ubiquitous ones you can get that feature a phrase like “#1 Mom,” or, as in this case, your first name. I have the kind of name that’s easy to find on personalized keychains, but I have never once been to Hawaii. And besides, if I ever do manage to get there some day, I’d like to think I’d do better in the souvenir department than a pineapple keychain with my name on it. I finally give up trying to remember why the keychain is supposed to be meaningful and move on. 

5.    A small cardboard disc depicting a frog sitting on a lily pad under a rainbow. The frog is smiling a serene little frog smile. Pogs were vaguely cool back then, in the right crowd, and this frog doesn’t look like the type to be in that particular group. I know I wasn’t. Scribbled on the back are the words “Hey there loser!!” The handwriting is almost familiar, I should recognize it, it’s on the tip of my brain. I dig out my yearbook from junior year and compare this froggy-backed insult with inscriptions from friends promising to K.I.T.! LYLAS! 

Keep in touch! Love you like a sister! How earnest we all were, thinking friendships would survive in the real world, outside the confines of school and summer vacation. We didn’t know yet what the real world was, so we couldn’t have known. Reading through everything my long-ago friends wrote, I barely recognize who I used to be. I sincerely hope I never wrote LYLAS in someone else’s yearbook. Especially my actual sister's.

6.    The box offers up some origami, and I know instinctively that this is where the good stuff is going to be. Secret notes tucked away inside intricate ways of folding looseleaf paper into shapes that can only be perfected by kids sitting bored in biology class. I tease apart an elaborate star shape only teenage girls know how to make correctly and see my own circa 1997 handwriting proclaim, I dropped my taco! 

I search for a memory of ever dropping a taco. Ice cream, sure. (That one still stings.) Sitting on a plate of bean dip at a party once, yes, but I can find nothing in my past having to do with fallen tacos. (And in my defense, the room was dark because we were watching a movie, and setting a plate of dip on the sofa to hold your spot while you run to the bathroom is just a stupid idea. I’m looking at you, Jerrod Cannistraci!) Using nothing but pure muscle memory, I re-fold the star and with it all the questions left unanswered by the note’s message and the very fact of its existence in the ceramic box. 

I’ve become an outsider to my own inside jokes, and I don’t know how to feel about that. 

7.    I try again with a piece of paper folded to look like a mini envelope. A mysterious handwriting—a different one from the cardboard frog’s, and obviously a boy’s—scrawls: “YOUR MOM! OH SNAP!”

This time, I don’t even try to match the writing to a yearbook entry. Had this really been my life? The objects are one thing, but this strange (and, let’s face it, mostly rude) collection of written outbursts? Teenage me seems like a real weirdo. 

Any lingering traces of nostalgia I might have had when I first opened the box have been annihilated and I am so, so glad that in I’m no longer the same me being preserved in a high school ceramics project. 

But I’m still proud of the box.