Suhas - Week 14: My Memory Box
Sitting atop a drawer in my room lies a large IKEA plastic storage bin. The clasps of the box are broken after years of opening and closing, and the lid no longer properly fits. It looks like it doesn’t weigh much, but it’s actually quite heavy—both in its physical weight and in the emotional weight of the memories it holds.
Inside is every one of my yearbooks since kindergarten, along with random projects from each of my school years. This includes the star student poster I made in 2nd grade, my 4th grade California mission project, and plenty of other random assignments. Scattered between the contents are pieces of memorabilia from vacations, the small log with my science camp name on it, random drawings or writing that must’ve meant something to me at the time, and, more recently, my POAS paper. I always aim to add at least three to four pieces of my life into the box every year.
I don’t open the box often; it’s by no means an everyday occurrence. It’s reserved for those random Tuesday nights when I’m bored out of my mind or when I happen to spot it during the summer or a weekend. I take it down and look through it, generally smiling and laughing at what’s inside.
I always have slightly different emotions when opening the box. What I once found extremely funny may feel a little embarrassing just a few years later. Memory by no means stays still. It always grows on you. I’m sure that when I open this box in five or ten years, I’ll have completely different thoughts, feelings, and emotions.
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| Above is a picture of my memory box in my room. |
Hi Suhas,
ReplyDeleteYour introduction was extremely captivating for me as I wondered what an IKEA plastic box has to do with memory but now I see how it symbolizes your memory. I have a similar box with all my tennis trophies and medals and other random stuff that I like to open every once in a while to recall that one trip to Hawaii or that one time I beat a cheater in a match. I also relate to that feeling that I have different emotions whenever I decide to open the box because it reminds me of different memories when I open them. It sort of acts as a physical library for my memories that my brain automatically deletes because I don’t need those memories anymore. I took inspiration from your idea to put your POAS paper in your memory box and added a page of it just to remember the struggles and time I put into the research paper and hopefully act as motivation for me whenever I need it in the future. Overall, I loved reading your blog.
-Krish
Hey Suhas! I have a memory box, too–or rather, a memory drawer, the bottom one of my nightstand dedicated to holding anything and everything I feel represents me. Mine probably has less rhyme and reason to it than yours, though–looking through it right now, it contains everything from birthday cards to small crochet crafts to the receipt from the first monetary purchase I made. I still have my name tag from science camp, too! Sometimes I’ll be looking for something in the drawer and get completely distracted by a rediscovery, ultimately forgetting what I was looking for in the first place. It’s really cool how you add school projects to your box, as well–I feel like, with school being such a large part of our lives, a memory box would feel incomplete without some memorabilia. I absolutely agree that memories hold emotion, and I love the way you phrased it as memory having “emotional weight” and never “stay[ing] still.” Sometimes I’ll look at a note, fondly remember the good times I had with a friend, and other times I’ll look at the same note with regret for not keeping in touch. Thanks for sharing!
ReplyDeleteHi Suhas,
ReplyDeleteI thought this blog post was really touching and interesting, and I definitely found it relatable in my own life as well. This idea of a “memory box” is a concept that I believe is found in many households, including mine, albeit in different forms. For me, my parents’ bedroom has a cabinet that holds a bunch of old yearbooks and elementary school projects that were really memorable and defining experiences for myself and my sister. It has sort of become the go to location for anything nostalgia-inducing. I’ve seen this same thing occur in many other households such as my friends’ and my cousins’. I think I can definitely relate to how heavy these boxes and cabinets can become, getting overflowed with memories and new additions across the years. But more than that, I see what you mean by “emotional weight.” Although these memories that are represented by the objects in the box aren’t actually heavy things, they seriously carry a weight that symbolizes the importance of them. That isn’t to say, however, that these memories are a “weight” in a negative sense, which would mean that they are a nuisance or a factor that holds back. Instead, they are a positive representation of events that happened in our past, and the weight stems from a sense of nostalgia.
-Ritwik