Labeled & Sealed

I collect memories the same way I collect objects. Every time something major happens — good or bad — I put the pieces of it into an imaginary box. Not sealed yet. Just gathered. All the relevant details packed together while they're still raw.

I leave it open for a while. I let the wound scab over, let myself scratch at it when I need to, let the joy fade if it was joy instead of pain. And once enough time has passed that I've stopped reaching for it, I seal the box. Tape it shut. Label it in black marker with a name and a date. Then I set it down in the storage of my mind, next to the hundreds of others already arranged there, and I rarely take it back out.

I'm particular about the arranging, more than I'd like to admit. I take everything out before I tape a box shut and put it back in a different order, and then a different order than that, until it settles into something that feels finished rather than just full. I don't know exactly what I'm checking for. Maybe just whether it can close without anything sticking out — whether it's actually done, or only quiet for now.

I didn't do this on purpose. I didn't sit down one day and decide to build a filing system for my own life. It just happened, conversation by conversation, the way certain things would come up — one memory leading to another — and I'd be forced to sit with whatever was still unresolved, or relive whatever had been unbearably good.

I'd go somewhere else for a second, staring past whoever I was talking to, replaying anger, despair, joy, all of it at once. That's where the joke started. It was said that I looked like I was having war flashbacks, and it stuck. We named it that, actually — war flashbacks — half a joke, half the only language we had for whatever it was I kept returning to. I didn't realise those conversations were becoming boxes too.

I thought I'd just stopped thinking about certain things. I didn't notice I'd been quietly packing them away until recently, when I went looking for one — hoping for a glimpse, just a peek at what used to be — and it sprang open instead.

Everything came out at once.

The good tangled up with the bad. All the memories I'd chosen not to think about because thinking about them made me too much of something. Too emotional. Too hopeful. Too delusional, maybe.

That's when I truly saw the habit for what it was. Brown cardboard boxes. Black marker. Names and dates. Arranged and rearranged until the order felt right, then taped shut the moment I decided I'd been dwelling long enough — the moment the thought of a person could become something I only passed by instead of something I lived inside.

Of course, not everything gets boxed. Some things stay out.

A few objects still sit on my desk, close enough that I see them without meaning to, and I've stopped pretending I don't glance at them more than I'd admit. I've never packed them away properly. I just stopped giving them the same weight I used to.

I tell myself that leaving something out in plain sight is a different kind of forgetting than the taped-up kind, and mostly I believe that.

Every so often, on the right occasion, I let myself revisit just enough to settle whatever unease brought me back — never enough to slide into needing it again.

We used to joke about my war flashbacks like they belonged entirely to the past. Like the war was something already fought, boxed, and dated.

I don't know when that stopped being true.

How did you become my latest war?

Harmony Commons, 9th Floor (5:00am) | July 12, 2026