Inside the red box above her wardrobe there were many miscellaneous cards that she might use one day. For example there was a keycard she used to use at a laundromat back in her old college town. This keycard still had over 12 dollars left on it so she'd kept it. But it'd been years since she moved away, down to
Bloomington, IN
, so there was no point in keeping it anymore. Yet each time she spotted it while flipping through her red box she only thought 'well I really should get rid of that' before hesitating and promising herself that she'd do it another time.
We like to think that if we don't throw something away then we'll never lose what was once in there. She would never go to that laundromat, and she didn't know anybody back in that town. So that
money
was about as good as gone. But for some reason she imagined that it would feel like throwing away 12 dollars if she threw away the keycard.
That was just one example. There was a punchcard with eight punches out of ten from a cafe she used to go to back in college. But the place had closed down since then. She had kept the punchcard inside this red box, all these years hoping to someday redeem her
free coffee
with the 10th punch, but now that was impossible. But still she kept the punchcard as an artifact of her favorite cafe. Some things depart and we don't want to forget them so we'll hang onto physical things attached to them.
Some things leave or die but we don't want them to. Or we like to believe that they're still here. So we hang on... to anything that we can grasp. Inside the red box was a
gift card
from her
ex-boyfriend
.
