My Shoebox

MY MOTHER and I had an argument recently over a seemingly insignificant shoebox.

It occurred one weekend as she was getting rid of the clutter that had accumulated in our storeroom. I was busy fixing my closet that had turned out to be a total disaster. You see, I have this bad habit of not putting back my clothes after picking out what I would wear on a particular day. Weekends are the most convenient time for me to put some order in my pathetic closet.

After folding clothes or hanging them for an hour, I went out of my room to take a rather late breakfast. Suddenly, something caught my attention. It was lying by its lonesome beside our trash bin. The poor thing must have been asking why it ended up in that miserable place.

I rushed to my mother to ask her if she had any idea how precious that shoebox was to me. She said she didn’t know.

That shoebox has been with me since I was 12. When I first got hold of it, I had no idea that I would be keeping it for so many long years.

But then I didn’t know that I would develop an obsession with letters. I remember that when we were in 6th grade, my best friend and I wrote each other letters even though we saw each other every single class day. Every other day, we would drop by our school’s mail service to retrieve the letters we had written to each other. What silly sixth graders we were!

As the letters started piling up on my study table, I wondered where I would keep them. When I saw the shoebox in my mother’s drawer, I knew I had found the answer.

Through the years, my shoebox has held mementos and memories of my past. It used to hold only my treasury of letters from friends and even foes, but as I grew older, I began to stack up on knickknacks that would remind me of days gone by.

The shoe box is, in fact, my Pandora’s box. Unlocking it may not exactly result in catastrophe but it will unleash a whole lot of emotions—joy and sadness, hope and fear, anger and frustration, to name a few. Going through the contents of this box never fails to bring a smile to my face on most occasions. But there are times when it brings tears to my eyes. Every item in it has a story to tell.

There’s that dried rose petal that a high school “friend” gave to me on Valentine’s Day. I had actually slipped it between the pages of Volume 3 of my Encyclopedia and totally forgotten about it. But several years later as I was doing some research, I found it lying flat on the brittle pages of the book. I gave it a new home: my shoe box.

Another item in that box is a heart-shaped bookmark from the first guy to tell me that I was the most beautiful woman on the face of the earth. Oh, what silly lies love can utter! He knew how I devoured books. I even warned him not to ask me out while I was trying to finish a novel by some Russian writer.

I have no idea where he is now. Something tells me he’s married. Or is he?

One letter that kept me giggling for hours was from a friend who was undeniably smitten by her Philosophy professor. In class, she did nothing but drool over her teacher. She doodled hearts of various sizes on her notes, while Professor X expounded in Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. She eventually professed her love for him on one of her test papers. Nothing happened though. And now, she’s happily married to her high school sweetheart.

I still have with me my first pay envelope that I received six years ago. It was my first taste of financial independence. It meant that no longer would I depend on my parents’ benevolence. I felt like I had finally become a full-fledged, functioning and productive mammal. But even as I began earning my own keep, I knew it didn’t give me a license to splurge on everything I want. Times are hard you know, so I learned to save for the rainy days.

Photos use up a lot of space in my shoebox. Unlike those that I keep in albums, these photos were sent or given to me by people who were once part of my life: friends who haven’t been to the Philippines for the past 10 years, acquaintances who have come and gone, and former lovers who defined what love was to me back then.

I love photos, old and new. They tell a thousand stories. It’s history captured on a roll of film. The people on glossy paper may not be around anymore, but their photos immediately summon old memories.

Truth be told, my shoebox is one of the things I can’t live without. I could survive without the modern-day conveniences such as a mobile phone, a laptop, a PDA, an iPod, but not without my shoebox. Call me a sentimental fool if you must, but this box certainly keeps me in touch with my past and serves as a reminder of what I was and how I used to be. And it always feels good to look back at these memories. After all, these are what make us who we are today.

When I confronted her about the shoebox, my mother was stunned. And she couldn’t say anything as I recited a whole litany of reasons why this shoebox matters a lot to me.

Of course, it was a mistake to have kept it in our storeroom. But I did it because there was no room space left in my cabinet. Now I keep it under my bed. I am planning to purchase a transparent bin that will become my shoebox’s new home. And hopefully that’s where it will stay forever -- just within my reach, along with the memories that each item brings.