The box in the cabinet

Hanging on a wall was a flat-screen smart TV, connected to the internet. You could access almost every streaming service from it, and thus watch almost any movie or series available online. It was very convenient.

Now, under the hanging flat-screen smart TV, there was a low cabinet, inside the cabinet there was a box, and inside the box, there was a VHS cassette player. It was last used about 22 years ago, and everyone had forgotten it was still there. It couldn’t see anything from inside the box inside the cabinet, but it could still listen, especially when people were speaking loudly. This VHS player had been witness to many a celebration, fight, and game night. But the best thing was when it had news of its favorite person. She was named Helena and had been only four when it arrived. Her mother had bought it brand new from a friend, alongside a cassette tape of Disney’s The Sleeping Beauty. 

At four little Lena had no idea about what was happening in the movie, but she knew the pictures were pretty. So she asked her mother to play it twice a day for a week. Her mother couldn’t listen to Once Upon a Dream another time and bought Snow White and Aladdin. 

The VHS player, at the time the proud resident of the top of the cabinet, loved watching Lena watch movies. No one else in the house loved movies quite as much as her. Later that same year, her mother took a gamble on buying Shrek, and the VHS player worried that Lena would lose interest. Fortunately, it didn’t happen, and she seemed to love ogres and donkeys just as much as she loved princesses. 

It took a month for Lena to begin demanding new movies. That was when her mother began recording on blank tapes the ones that aired on open channels. The VHS tape couldn’t blame her for choosing piracy. Helena was very convincing, and cassette tapes were still expensive back then.

And so the years went by. One day her mother recorded Beauty and the Beast, and Helena wanted to read just like Belle. Someone gifted her Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, and she decided to be a horse for a couple of days. The next week, she was a lioness, because she watched The Lion King at a friend’s house. She bought Treasure Planet by saving her allowance, and her grandmother had to swear to get her a solar surfer. She got The Incredibles from her father on Christmas, and can still quote it by heart - she was one of the childless adults on the opening night of The Incredibles 2, fourteen years later. She watched The Prince of Egypt and it was the first time she cried because of a movie. And through it all, the VHS player watched her grow. It was watching when she first put pen to paper and wrote a little story on a notepad on the living room table, about a bird learning how to sing. It always valued these moments, and it always felt valued in return.

One day Lena’s mother brought home this new, flat, silver appliance. A DVD player, she called it. The VHS player didn’t know what a DVD was, but that was the day the three colored cables were taken from it for the first time since it had been placed on the cabinet. The mother connected them to that DVD player and put a circular shiny thing in it. The VHS player watched in confusion as a movie started to play. It was Ice Age 2. It only became clear what that meant when, about a month later, the mother unplugged the VHS player, put it in a box, and placed it inside the cabinet. Movies were still being played daily in the house, but the VHS player wasn’t a part of it anymore. It couldn’t see Helena.

The VHS player found itself alone in darkness and silence. Without anything else to do, it sat there, gathering dust and rust. It stayed like that for some time, it didn’t know how much, without Lena’s daily routine to be able to parse through the hours. Until one day, unexpectedly, it heard a voice. It was Helena, that’s for sure. A lower voice than it remembered, but still her. She was telling her mom about winning the creative writing competition at her school. She told the story of a butterfly and a moth learning about each other and falling in love. The VHS player was so proud, it was almost like being plugged in again. It might not be there for her anymore, but it had been there when it mattered. 

It listened when Lena explained to her dad what she learned about how to write a script, not the same as writing a book. It listened when she had that loud discussion with both her parents about what to do with her life and the meaning of happiness. And it listened when she got the acceptance letter from the college she chose for filmmaking. After that, there were long periods of silence, with Lena only stopping by every few months.

On a day like every other day, the VHS player heard the cabinet door being opened, the box lid lifted, and it saw Lena for the first time in forever. She was so beautiful and still so familiar. She smiled, just as happy to see it. She cradled it in her arm and left the house, took it to a repair shop. 

It didn’t work, of course. It could feel its dead parts inside, forever broken. But it did not matter because Lena had always been a sentimental creature.

So that’s how, from its newest, proudest place on the top shelf of a tall cabinet filled with antique cassette tapes, the VHS player saw through the flat-screen smart TV the transmission of little Lena’s first interview as director of her very own movie.