Tossed.

On a shelf high in my closet sits a box. This morning, I took it down, dumped it over on my bed and picked through the pieces of paper I’d written and thrown in since it was given to me as a one-year sobriety present.

Someone mentioned recently the idea of dumping out their “God box” every once in a while, to see what “god” may have already taken care of, and to see what we’re still holding onto, even as it’s been "surrendered" to the box.

It’s sweet and astonishing to me, all the things that tortured me so hard, I found them listed on multiple post-its, torn pieces of paper, even a square of toilet paper.

The ones that I got to separate from “still actively seeking hope/help” included a lot of men’s/boy’s names that haven’t gotten a rise out of me for years. I had to wrack my memory at one of them, and then got to see the number of times others' names had been tossed in there in the hope for resolution and divine intervention, and indeed, they've become completely old news. Today, those got tossed to the resolved pile.

In that pile, I also tossed, Food issues and Smoking. Issues that I haven’t had to box with for years, so much so that I am surprised to remember them, and to notice they caused me such pain (well, smoking was a bitch to quit – and I never doubt that one will always lead to more).

The ones that remain in the box, that I am throwing back in there, are varied.

One reads:

      Jesse Morris will live.

      And he will find recovery.

      And he will be beautiful.

      Amen.

Jesse Morris did not live. But I believe him to still be beautiful.

I also have the memorial service booklet from Aaron Brown’s funeral following his heroin overdose.

I have the necklace my father gave me when I was sick with cancer. A photo of my mom holding my brother, age 2. A photo of the ex whose innocence we shared.

And the torn shreds of a fortune cookie I didn’t understand why I’d ripped and torn in there until I pieced it back together: “As long as your desires are not extravagant, they will be granted.” – I can easily see why I would bristle at such a fortune!

Finally, what will stay in the box, rethrown in, and recommitted to allowing them to be “taken care of,” are those issues which have remained “issues” to this very day.

The best illustration of these being an actual illustration:

Home, Love, Health, Security, Happiness.

(Or at least I think that’s happiness, and not Pirates.)

There are a bevy of papers with some amalgam of these on it. Some verbose pleas to a higher power, others simply a heart drawn on a post-it.

It is cleansing and reaffirming to dump and sort this box, this box that over the years I’ve begged over for things to change, hurled words in there like grenades, or exhausted, dropped them in tear-stained.

There are ones that I don’t know if “resolution” is possible, like those untimely deaths of beautiful people. And they will stay in the box.

There are ones where I still can’t see what resolution will look like at all, as with my dad, my career, and “my life,” as I wrote it again and again. They will stay there, too. 

But, luckily, there must be hope from a sorting such as this, because the pile of “resolved” issues is nearly half. Those torturous achings that caused me to toss names and circumstances in that have simply fallen out of mind, out of importance, into the fate and design of my past...

These ones that make me smile now for the girl who wrote them, and for the wisdom of time that solved them: They give me hope for the others.